I've actually heard conference speakers call out behaviours as toxic that are basically the defining character traits of introverts (not to mention people in the autism spectrum).
Note that I'm not even talking about the shouty-sweary-abrasive behaviour people like Torvalds are being derided for but simply preferring to work alone rather than in a team.
Of course, it's just my personal opinion and experience. As an introvert, i dislike crowds, big events, dancing and singing; It's challenging, but very beneficial to invest some of my energy into "being social". If you can learn ${lang}, you can learn to identify your own feelings. Once you know your own feelings, you can learn empathy. Once you learn empathy, social skills is a breeze.
Eh, you're assuming everyone feels the same way about everything. I hate it when people talk about my clothes or my looks. It makes me really self-conscious and embarrassed, even if it's a compliment. So in an effort to practice "the golden rule," I don't talk about others' clothing and looks. Turns out other people get offended when no one comments on a new haircut or whatever. Knowing my own feelings actually ended up as the opposite of empathy.
In Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson gives exactly the sort of compliments I would be comfortable with: "Your work product is often adequate.", "Sharing a workspace with you is not entirely unpleasant.", "I don't dread seeing your face entering my office.", "You remind me of a 16 oz. porterhouse."
It makes me a bit sad that they were perceived as jokes.
/Why are you upset I don't just walk into your house!?
I don't believe that's the case; I think you're just early on in the process arpa describes. For me, part of really coming to know my own feelings was understanding the feeling very separately from the circumstances that trigger it.
With that separation in hand, it was much easier to develop deeper empathy. I would perceive other people's emotions and then work on reverse-engineering their very different triggers and preferences. And, of course, reverse-engineering how I ended up with the particular triggers and preferences I had myself.
For anybody eager to pursue that route, the two things I recommend are a meditation practice and seeing a therapist.
That's a dangerous line of thinking. It implies that people with a lack of social skills lack empathy.
Believe me: I think I know my feelings pretty well. But I also claim that they are often so much different from the feelings other people have that this does not help me to empathize. Just to give one example: How is the feeling called that you feel when you read and understand beautiful mathematical proofs? I have not found a name for this feeling in any psychology book that I have read. On the other hand grief (in the sense of the feeling that people feel when someone near dies; I hope this is the intended translation of the German word "Trauer" - I'm no English native speaker) is a feeling that I only know from literature and watching people - I can confidently say that I never felt such a feeling myself.
Back to topic: I believe the step from "knowing your own feelings" to "empathy" assumes that your feelings are somehow related to the feelings other people feel. I think this bold assumption does not hold very strongly for me. Believe me: If I act on this assumption, chaos will happen. On the other hand if I apply, say, some maximum-likelihood estimation (to use a word from statistics, don't interpret the word "maximum-likelihood" too literally) on how another person might feel (which is often quite the opposite to how I feel and completely against my instincts and I would never like to be treated this way), at least less chaos will happen.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy
That might resonate with you.
It's based on an essay by Augusten Burroughs at the Wall Street Journal, and shares much with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow", from the book of the same name.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047466045773798...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/flow-the-psychology-of-optimal...
I would describe a feeling when you read and understand beautiful mathematical proofs as bliss or relief (when it was hard before everything unfolds). Dopamine kick? It is just that most people don't get satisfaction from such things.
> bliss
It's not about happiness - the world is still bad - but about deep understanding.
>awe
It's not that I'm intimidated by it - it's just the feeling of having understood something really deep
> epiphany
it comes near, but epiphany is (as far as I understand it) the feeling of the sudden realization (which is different), but I talk the feeling that you have afterwards. While in panel 2 of
the feeling is clearly "epiphany" the later panels transport a different feeling (a much less "striking" one) - the latter is the feeling I mean.
> It is just that most people don't get satisfaction from such things.
But they might get the same feeling from other stimuli.
The "elegant math proof" feeling was just the description of a feeling that at leas some HN readers seem to be able to empathize with - I also had much stranger feelings under meditation (that I never had in "ordinary" life) that are even much harder to describe (and I only had them one or two times - so my descriptions might even not be very accurate).
Instead, I'd just say that I love it, and wouldn't even attempt to express my actual feeling.
I would only have used "epiphany" to express the feeling of figuring something out on my own, suddenly, but never the feeling of figuring out something that was clearly designed to explain something to me. Still, it's the closest word in this list, in my opinion. But not adequate.
I would call that "awe".
There's a big difference between being relatively quiet and lacking social skills. Unless you look at from the personality type that needs to fill every silence with any old rubbish.
Which behaviours? I'd be interested in hearing specifics.
Maybe cite the conference speakers too (assuming these were public statements)? Who has condemned a preference to work alone as 'toxic'?
I've heard similar lines of thought from other people in the same circles before, though.