This is a letter I sent to the author of essay few minutes ago:

Hi,
As you probably know already, your essay landed on Hacker News main page:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2345552 Also, here you can see comments.
Congratulations for that.

However, being keenly interested in applied psychology I’d like to point out few things about your essay.

First thing that made me worried is that you actually didn’t mention Emotional Intelligence. I’m not sure whether it was so known back then in 2005. You rely on extrovert/introvert factor to categorize people. The same what Jonathan Rauch did.

Very latest researches and publications tend to categorize people by low/high Emotional Intelligence (EQ), which is a good choice in my opinion. Note that EQ covers wide range of factors, but generally relates to understanding one’s own and others’ behavior. So this not only applies to dealing with any social interactions, but also to dealing with one’s self.

You may now assume that introvert means low EQ and extrovert means high EQ, but it isn’t necessarily true. I’m in one of very top high schools in Poland. And we have an AP Computer Science class, which has a program that is very similar to what is done on University on Algorithmics. Also we have analogical Mathematics class.

Obviously, we observe EQ drop when comparing these special classes to others. However we do not observe introverts/extroverts categories. Of course those extroverts – low intelligence guys are quite funny ;) , but that’s not the point. The point is to show that there’s not so much connection between EQ and being extro-/introvert.

Now, you are right that introverts are generally ranked lower in “life/people categories”. That happens because emotions plays key role in human brain. They were introduced by evolution to help species survive, but now it turned against us.

High EQ people (not all extroverts and not only extroverts, also some introverts) know how to use this to help themselves in many life situations. They know how to negotiate, how to talk people into something, how to have great friendships and fulfilling marriages. In our times EQ became one of the most important factors in life.

So I believe we should stop complaining against people treating others worse because these others are introverts. Rather we should improve our EQ to be aware of our own behavior, of what controls us, because this is the way to living our lives better.

With equal EQ levels introvert and extrovert will be dealing with life very similarly, they both will be able to find a way in difficult situations. Unfortunately, extrovert will always have an advantage over introvert, e.g. extrovert will have more connections and that as we know is better in business. But it will not be that significant.

What I want to point out is that we need to help people improve EQ and choosing people by high EQ levels (observe them in social interactions) is not so surprising from the point of chooser. Fortunately, Emotional Intelligence is not something like “being tall”, which cannot be changed.

At last I’d like to thank you for this essay. I’m sure it is going to have positive impact on its readers. When hunting for those EQ guys we sometimes forget that there is also a place for IQ guys. And they are going to find it too. Also, they are in lucky situation, because they have high IQ, which cannot be changed and probably low EQ, which can (easily) be changed. The life would be theirs, only if they did a little to improve Emotional Intelligence.

Sincerely,
Jakub Malinowski from Poland