Comment by bkovitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkovitz | Hacker News Reader

All this psychologizing about shyness: poor self-esteem, self-consciousness, withholding oneself from others out of selfishness, etc. My own shyness, and that of other shy people I know, has been due to something completely different, and much more straightforward:

  Not knowing the social conventions.

What is it that people are doing at parties? What are they talking about? Why are they doing this? It seems incomprehensible. With someone I haven't met or barely know, it's hard to find a way to say what comes to mind in a way that a total stranger would relate to. With someone I know well, I can say what comes to mind, because there's a lot of shared context. This is the common pattern among introverts: quiet with strangers, endlessly talkative with close friends. And why is that? Because with close friends, you have the shared context and conventions needed to have the kind of conversation that makes sense to you.

(Please, no pity or advice. I've worked on my shyness and gotten good enough at connecting with strangers to occasionally even pick up women on the street--a skill every hacker entrepreneur should have. I'm just pointing out that the psychologizing is wrong. The path out of shyness, at least for a lot of us geeks, is simply to learn to play the social game, not to address some sort of self-esteem issue.)

You seem to be framing the issue as a rational rather than emotional problem -- i.e., not knowing the social conventions.

I don't buy it. Stick an extroverted people person and an introverted shy guy in an unfamiliar social situation (in a foreign country, say). The way they deal with it will differ greatly. The extrovert will plow ahead, not worry too much about making mistakes, and figure out how to play the social game pretty quickly. The introvert will probably be too scared of doing things wrong to even start.

Learning to play the social game is not hard: make eye contact, open your mouth, and start talking. Building the courage to actually do it is hard. That's crux for most shy people (as it was for me).

If you're out there talking to people and still can't find shared context, then you're not shy, you're just talking to the wrong people. Time to seek out different social gatherings.

For those that have difficulty learning from social interactions (autistic spectrum folks), things may admittedly be different. This is outside my experience so I can't speak to it.

Indeed I am framing this as a rational rather than emotional problem.

I think you made a very good point about the difference in the way extraverts and introverts enter new social situations. That really does make a huge difference: just dive in, mess up, and adjust (a lot like, say, running a start-up). That will get the learning process going. I think there's another element, though: that incomprehension of "lite" social interaction.

Regarding the courage hypothesis, here's how I've often heard it put: "Oh, don't be afraid, don't care what other people think, just say what you really want to say." To me, this misses what's happening. What's really happening is simply not having a clue how to participate. A dial tone on the brain. The reason, if I pick up a guitar, I don't play music, isn't because I'm afraid to, but because I don't know how to play guitar. I tried going to bars a bunch (I seem to have lots of social courage), but I didn't really get anywhere until some friends explained various social protocols: posture, how to make physical contact, how to pick out clothes, what to not talk about (decorators in Python, cryonics), etc.

Here's a weird piece of evidence: extraverts have exactly the same feeling of disorientation in our world. Get a strong extravert into a conversation that pursues something in depth (not so much breadth), and they get a dial tone on the brain, too. They quickly bail, the same way introverts bail out of social situations.

Hmm... mild autism. Maybe that's what I've got (and many other shy, geeky people). That's a new angle, and it might be right.

Another possibility: optimal stimulation level.

Mild autism is too harsh of a term for most shy, geeky people I think. Things like this in psychology are a bell curved spectrum. Being a little to the left or right doesn't mean you are autistic, it just means you have more characteristics that are associated with one side of the spectrum or another.

Well that's exactly the wrong way to look at it.

The basic problem is caring what other people think of you. The basic problem is placing more value on what other people think of you instead of placing more value on what you think of yourself.

The worst thing that could happen to you, is you could learn the social conventions and learn how to be a sheep well enough to fit in. Think about it, would you even be on this site if you learnt the social conventions earlier and realized how not "cool" it is to be a geek?

You talk about shared contexts. Fundamentally we are all human beings. We all laugh. We all love. That is enough context to talk and connect with anyone for many lifetimes.

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