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You Can Change Your Personality

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Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#51

Post by qball »

g00gler wrote: post #41
dpark wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is mostly an effect of nerds not wanting to be exclusionary and therefore enabling this kind of behavior. If you're a nerd and you're kind of a prick, other nerds will tend to excuse it rather than just pushing you away. They'll disregard your behavior and keep inviting you to events. They'll ignore the fact that you're unpleasant when bonuses/promos are being handed out at work because it should be base…

Why not both?

To someone with an uncommon interest (a "nerd", in other words, though nerdy interests tend to require higher-than-average intelligence to possess), people with that interest are hard to find.

Once you finally meet someone sharing that interest, and it turns out that they act like a prick, you have a difficult choice (if you value sociable behavior over the opportunity to be social at all; willingly choosing isolation is frequently not a tenable position).

The cost and stakes for confrontation (and exclusion) are higher than it is in a "nerdier" group than for people with more common interests, simply because of the lack of people who are capable of the interest in the first place. So, more bad behaviors are tolerated. It's also worth noting that "bad" covers both "weird" and "malicious", which is also why groups with these interests tend to be much more accepting of people with other interests outside of those standard for the surrounding society.

The feedback loop is as such less; personality quirks don't get as rounded-off as they would in a less-exclusive group, so any conversions from asshole -> non-asshole in a small community will take longer if they even happen at all.

So, it should be no surprise that individuals more aware than most of the fact that "good people are hard to find" are willing to make certain sacrifices to retain them. For individuals whose interests and abilities involve a larger cross-section of the population, however, people are much more interchangeable, so excluding weird/malicious behavior is much easier.

As an example, consider the tech community's recent trend of attempting to exclude speakers with non-standard political views from conferences. The arguments for doing so come from people with the mindset that technology experts are interchangeable (which is valid in some areas), the arguments against it come from those who see technology experts as an unusually scarce resource (which is valid everywhere else in the world).

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#52

Post by tw04 »

mseebach wrote: post #34
sametmax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Most asocial persons I know have been raised that way by society. Now you want them to undo what took years of training. This is hard. And unfair.

That is true, but irrelevant. "He had a hard time in school, so we should tolerate him being an asshole" won't really fly. Many racists were probably raised that way by society, too, and undoing that is probably both hard and unfair - but necessary and a reasonable prerequisite for being a part of polite society.

I think you're missing the point. "Being racist" is pretty easy to nip in the bud. Telling someone not to be mean to someone else just because they're insert non-white race is easy. Telling someone "when you say X, that doesn't even occur to you might be offensive, it upsets other people". Now repeat that for a thousand different social interactions, and tell me how easy it is.

"Don't be an asshole" is what? "Being an asshole" means different things to different people. THAT is the core of the issue.

For instance: I've got coworkers, who if they screw something up, I can just straight up say - that was wrong, do it this way next time, then we won't have an issue. For other coworkers that direct interaction would be the absolute end of the world. And instead you have to tap dance around until you eventually get to a state where you're fairly certain they know not to do what they did again.

Would it make me an asshole for not knowing one person can handle direct feedback, and others can't? Is it "being an asshole" for telling someone factual information without sugar coating? I don't think so, plenty of people out in the real world do, however.

And, quite frankly, most of the people who want direct feedback consider people who tapdance assholes because so much effort is wasted on getting to the point.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#53

Post by bjterry »

albertTJames wrote: post #33

This is a stale and old debate, personality is extremely flexible and heavily depends on environmental and social constraints, as were demonstrated by seminal social experiment studies such as those of Milgram or Zimbardo. The argument that the changes seen there are short lived can be contradicted by the fact that subjects always go back to their normal environment after the experiment. What I believe Ed Boyden woul…

This reminds me of an article I read which said that 95% of the soldiers in Vietnam who had become addicted to heroin simply stopped when they came back to America.

1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-...

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#54

Post by mememachine »

underwater wrote: post #29
nxc18 wrote: post #5

People often use "its just my personality" as an excuse for bad behavior. Intuitively I think most people know that you have control over your behavior at the very least as well as aspects of your personality. Just like any other activity, you can practice being a more considerate, or more respectful, or less neurotic personality. There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or workin…

It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey. Get a bunch engineers in a room and they'll argue forever about a solution because they don't understand their own biases or how emotion is clouding people's judgement. Bringing a bit of empathy can resolve…

>It is a really counter productive meme. My theory is that engineers are so comfortable using logic to solve problems, and viewing solutions as right or wrong that they fail to adapt when there are shades of grey.

Youre going wrong trying to paint engineers with a brush this broad.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#55

Post by awfgylbcxhrey »

77pt77 wrote: post #44
awfgylbcxhrey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a weird meme that tech people aren't capable of being "team players" or working with other people. This is purely anecdotal, but at one particularly memorable company, the head of HR would regularly make casual comments that cast the engineers as socially incapable and childish. Meanwhile, she was constantly offending people and her life was a chaotic mess. At the same company, they always talked about team…

> they always talked about team this and team that, but efforts to actually incorporate the team were obviously seen as weak, and the "arrogant know it all" persona was rewarded. These are usually techniques to weed out people that the people defending those strategies think (consciously or not) are unfit. If you follow the advice you really are unfit and they will exclude you. This is common across the board in soci…

These are usually techniques to weed out people that the people defending those strategies think (consciously or not) are unfit.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#56

Post by quickben »

atis wrote: post #42
albertTJames wrote: post #33

This is a stale and old debate, personality is extremely flexible and heavily depends on environmental and social constraints, as were demonstrated by seminal social experiment studies such as those of Milgram or Zimbardo. The argument that the changes seen there are short lived can be contradicted by the fact that subjects always go back to their normal environment after the experiment. What I believe Ed Boyden woul…

Serious question: why is choosing isolation "worst of all"?

We did not evolve in isolation, or cope well with it.

Find your tribe, whatever it may be, and you'll be happier.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#57

Post by dpark »

mseebach wrote: post #35
dpark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meme is that tech people are generally just assholes. It is a pretty common meme, but I don't think it's actually true. Very few of the tech people I know are actually assholes. Most are quite pleasant, even the ones that are socially awkward.

It's rare now, but probably less so in the 80s/90s. The BOFH meme didn't come from nowhere, and there's also the quite strikingly sudden exodus of women from the field to consider.

BOFH comes at least in part from putting people who don't want to do customer service into what are effectively customer service roles. You see this at food service locations where someone who hates customers ends up interacting with them. They end up being unpleasant. For roles like food service, the person eventually either gets fired or learns to be socially reasonable.

For technical support roles, this behavior gets a pass unless it's really egregious because the employee is supposedly hired for technical ability and not hospitality. Plus in these roles the "customer" is often another employee who's basically captive. So largely this is the result of messed up incentives.

You see the same issue, e.g., at the DMV. Largely the employees are fine, but there are always several who clearly don't want to be there and a couple who are actively unpleasant. The incentives are set up to enable this because customer service is not "job 1". The customers are captive and there's little pushing out unpleasant employees.

The relative lack of women is probably multifaceted but to the extent that it's related to antisocial geeks, I again think it's more to do with enabling the behavior than with the volume. A very small portion of the population can do severe damage if the rest allow it.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#58

Post by _0ffh »

dpark wrote: post #57
mseebach wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rare now, but probably less so in the 80s/90s. The BOFH meme didn't come from nowhere, and there's also the quite strikingly sudden exodus of women from the field to consider.

BOFH comes at least in part from putting people who don't want to do customer service into what are effectively customer service roles. You see this at food service locations where someone who hates customers ends up interacting with them. They end up being unpleasant. For roles like food service, the person eventually either gets fired or learns to be socially reasonable. For technical support roles, this behavior g…

The best character trait you could possibly have in a helping role is to genuinely enjoy the experience of having helped a person deserving help. Fortunately, I am blessed with that trait. But with that comes the challenge of sieving the "deserving" from the "undeserving", when everyone clamours for your time.

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#59

Post by pmoriarty »

jacobolus wrote: post #43
atis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: why is choosing isolation "worst of all"?

Isolation often gets a person stuck into positive feedback loops of negative feelings (loneliness, anxiety, sadness, guilt, shame, cynicism, paranoia, listlessness, self loathing, despair, etc.), disrupted circadian rhythms from poor sleep and lack of sunshine, lack of routines and loss of time sense, lack of exercise, unhealthy diet, poor personal hygiene and cleanliness, substance abuse, financial problems, and so…

As a counterpoint to this, see the many excellent articles on The Hermitary.[1]

Also see Anthony Storr's Solitude: A Return to the Self.[2]

Many people have historically chosen solitude for religious or spiritual reasons, to focus on something they wanted to achieve, because they just preferred being alone, or for many other reasons.

Many societies have stigmatized solitude and those who choose it, but on the other hand there have been social movements which have praised and advocated solitude.

[1] - http://www.hermitary.com/articles/

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Solitude-Return-Self-Anthony-Storr/dp...

Re: You Can Change Your Personality

#60

Post by ams6110 »

aoeu345 wrote: post #50
xkxx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isolation often gets a person stuck into positive feedback loops of negative feelings I became much happier after I chose to be alone. I realized that I'm not meant to have any close friends. I realized that I'm not a likable person. And I realized that it's totally okay. Even if I change to become a "better" (more likable, able to have more friends) person, I won't like myself. I like myself the way I am. Now, if…

It's easy to say that you're happier alone. It's much more difficult to admit to yourself that you have social anxiety that keeps you from making relationships. A human that does the first will decay over time. A human that does the second can be anything he/she wants to be. There is enormous supporting evidence that quantity and quality of relationships are directly correlated to happiness

There's enormous evidence for a lot of things, but that doesn't mean it's equally applicable to every individual. I see no reason to think that some small percentage of people truly are happier alone even if the opposite is true for the large majority.
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