The Geography of the Room | Hacker News Reader

The Geography of the Room

lesspenguiny.com

77 pointsless_penguiny31 comments

"Introvert" still doesn't mean "shy" or "socially awkward", however much shy and socially awkward people want to redefine it as such.

As a confident introvert who doesn't flounder in social settings, this stuff annoys the hell out of me.

At what point does an "introvert" become a "loner"? Or are all introverts loners by definition?

No. Absolutely not. They are totally different things.

I have quite a few extrovert traits but I am also shy and socially awkward. Mixing shy and introvert into one category leads to a lot of confusion.

Ambivert - noun - one whose personality type is intermediate between extrovert and introvert.[0]

I consider myself to be one.

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ambivert

> "Introvert" still doesn't mean "shy"

According to dictionary.com[0], that's exactly what it means.

Introvert - noun - A shy person.

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/introvert

The APA's definition is probably more authoritative, and is inline with what OP suggested:

https://dictionary.apa.org/introversion

The goal of a dictionary is to be a reliable indicator of actual usage, so an authoritative dictionary is a bit of a contradiction. Almost all English linguists reject that sort of prescriptivism.

Meaning that the opinion of the experts is that a word's "true meaning" is however it is commonly understood by the people using it.

I describe myself as an extrovert amongst mathematicians. (which, of course, means I'm still an introvert compared to most.)

I think it's a bell curve and most of us are ambiverts:

An ambivert is moderately comfortable with groups and social interaction, but also relishes time alone, away from a crowd. In simpler words, an ambivert is a person whose behaviour changes according to the situation they are in. In face of authority or in presence of strangers, the person may be introverted. However, in the presence of family or close friends, the person may be highly energetic or extraverted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion#...

"But I can’t imagine that someone surrounded by people of a similar age and of a similar background would prefer zero interaction to at least some interaction."

This author's a damn fool who hasn't taken the slightest effort to understand introverts on any level deeper than "how do I get the quiet people to fuel my need for constant social stimulation?"

My friends and co-workers believe and see me as a highly outgoing, social, talkative person.

Nevertheless, I'm an introvert at heart and can easily volunteer to help people understand and imagine what it's like to be a person surrounded by strangers of similar age & background and strognly prefer / find it easier to have zero interaction.

Hint: "Strangers" is the weighted keyword, not "similar background/age". [Heck, "Similar age" has, for most of my life, been a negative attribute - Until late thirties I tended to socialize better with people slightly or significantly older]

I’m curious how obvious vs non-obvious social positioning like this is to people here. It all feels fairly obvious and intuitive to me, but I suspect some of the lessons have been learned over time and didn’t actually come built in but were learned gradually through observation. Thinking back on it, it was probably in my mid 20s that I started paying conscious attention to how body positioning affects people socially and making efforts to make sure that everyone is physically included in conversations. Now I am acutely aware of it all the time.

Japanese business culture has an almost absurdly heightened sensitivity to positioning, diction, and body language.

I've heard of people getting upset about the ordering of email addresses in messages (this was a successful law firm where ordering was supposed to be based on "rank").

This is a real thing. I’ve experienced it myself. I tried to explain that the email client may reorder them, etc.

Zero knowledge about this, but I'd absolutely love to know more if you can suggest any sources. Or is it one of those unsaid things that one comes to know?

My main resource is Japanese TV, which is unfortunately hard to see outside Japan. They have quiz shows that are meant to train jobseekers on how to behave and maximize their chances. It’s right down to details like which seat to take in the waiting area before your meeting, where and when to sit in a conference room, whether or not to accept a drink offer, how to knock on a door, how to close a door behind you, etc.

It's also very interesting to me how so much of this stuff about body language is now shrouded in, well, if not "shame", then at least embarrassment. All because the pick-up artist community has relentlessly focused on body language as some magical panacea to anyone's romantic woes.

This is one of the few blog posts I've read that talks about body language from a purely social perspective.

I wish there was more content like this on social norms, extroversion, and social signalling that didn't go at all into strange PUA themes.

Glad you like the subject. I obviously think it's an underrated yet fascinating and rewarding area to focus one's attention, otherwise I wouldn't be writing these things.

Pick up without the stink is a mantra for the blog. I got the idea from a blog post with a catchy title on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RZrw9wpEWEwWRTzLk/more-art-l...

I think it just takes exposure and experience, and some people have had more than others. In my experience becoming accomplished requires repeated interactions with a large but rather stable social environment, where >5% of the people you encounter in a day (or evening) will be familiar to you and the rest loosely connected. That forces a person's reputation as a valued and testable trait over time. It also rewards making new social connections as they are likely to connect back to existing relationships.

It's a skill that you develop. Like bodybuilding or anything else where you can physically see differences, some people will have natural dispositions towards certain directions, but that's like, responsible differences at the .1%. It's a skill, like math aptitude, or abstract thinking. If you do it a lot, you will develop it.

It is probably telling of being online too long that lead me to feel the title was wrong. I went into this thinking it would be an analysis of blocking and character orientation in Wiseau's The Room.

someone definitely needs to write that article

Not an article, but there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD-YZbeajeY

Exactly what I first thought. I clicked through just because I was surprised to see an article on The Room on HN.

Pleasantly surprised with what I actually ended up reading

@less_penguiny, your newsletter popup opens over and over again when the user clicks the grey space to close it.

It seems like only clicking the small text link inside it correctly sets the cookie to remember that the user wanted it gone.

This is particularly annoying because it is binded to the scroll so it lets you scroll a few line before displaying again.

Thanks for the heads up, that sounds really annoying. Personally not getting the same, but definitely want to ensure other people aren't affected.

What browser are you using? What adblockers? Any special browser settings?

Edit: I see a potential cause of issues in the scroll handler, and I just deployed the change, so perhaps it's fixed on a refresh?

Here is a video of it happening: https://imgur.com/a/txwwv22

Chrome: Version 73.0.3683.86 (Official Build) (64-bit)

There's at least someone else with the same behavior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19643824

AHHH thanks, you're a star. Able to reproduce.

I misunderstood your text description and now I know exactly what you mean. It never occurred to me that people click outside the modal rather than on the "x". In retrospect it seems obvious that they would. Will fix.

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy a recent post discussing similar themes in the context of investor meetings: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/the-importance-of-seating-...

Personally I love these kinds of body language/group dynamics analyses. I also find it to be a good reality check - whenever we start thinking of ourselves as these high and mighty enlightened beings, to realize that we still follow these very basic scripts in social contexts. Human social behavior is fascinating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com