You don't get to have cool flaws

Thanks, added a disclaimer. It's an important disclaimer indeed: this advice was originally aimed at me personally so I should be quite careful when publishing it, to guard against what could be terrible advice to some or most.

I agree with Neil here: if you identify with your flaws, that is bad. By definition. If you are highly analytical and you identify with it, great, regardless of if other people see it as a flaw. Like you said and Neil's reply in the footnote, if it's a goal, then it is not a flaw. But if you say it is a personal flaw, then either you shouldn't be adopting it into your identity (you don't even have to try to fix it as noble as that would be, but you don't get to say "I'm the bad-at-math-person, it's so funny and quirky, and I just led my small business and partners into financial ruin with an arithmetic mistake," life is not a sit-com) or maybe you don't really see it as a flaw after all. Either way, something is wrong, either in your priorities or the reliability of your self-reports. And, yeah, this topic involves value judgments. If nothing has valence, then the notion of a flaw would not exist. 

The post reads to me as the author trying to unilaterally impose their personal ideal of perfection on other people.

I can't say I had the same observation regarding the post, but I just wanted to agree with the problem you describe. It irks me when people attempt to categorize flaws and build up a model of biological perfection, not realizing all the consequences, psychological and social alike, that it entails. It seems like a very naïve endeavor rooted in personal biases more than an objective assessment.

I'd be worried that "identifying as having a flaw" can begin as something merely aesthetic at first and end up deeply warping your lens of the world in the end. If "is known as the pessimist" or "is known as the optimist" becomes something you start wanting to live up to, I feel like you could do real damage to your empirical rationality. I guard myself against "aesthetic flaws" personally because they don't seem to be worth the amount of course-correcting I'd have to engage in just to keep an accurate-enough view of the world. I added a footnote though, thanks for the feedback.

Or to put it another way, why can't "how I look getting there" be a goal by itself?

Bigger the obstacles you have to overcome, the more impressive it looks to others. This can be valuable by itself, but in such situations it might be more efficient to reduce the actual flaw, and simply pretend that the effect is bigger. However, honesty is important, and honesty to yourself even more so.

since if you identify with your flaws, then maintaining your flaws is one of your goals

If a flaw is too hard  to remove now, you have to figure out a way to manage it. Feeling proud about your capablity despite the flaws is also definitely useful. If you're identifying with a flaw to motivate yourself, that can be a powerful tool. But when the opportunity aries to eradicate that flaw cheaply, dismiss the sunken cost of keeping the flaw. Evaluate whether keeping that flaw is actually your goal, or just a means.

Let me not become attached to personal flaws I may not want.

My instinctive reaction to this is "I'm allowed to identify with whatever I like, you don't get to tell me what I'm allowed to do". The post reads to me as the author trying to unilaterally impose their personal ideal of perfection on other people.

That was my instinctive reaction too, but there’s a charitable reading where the tone is primarily for internal use, e.g. for when you have trouble escaping a failure mode and you’d like to have a strong catchphrase already prepared for the next time you need it.

Say you’re procrastinating, then playing the game of identifying yourself with having this flaw may be one way your brain hide that you’re procrastinating for a reason you’re not confortable to admit. Once you noticed this might be a partial explanation, then you usually don’t want to be a procrastinator, but a rational person looking to overcome the limitations of its hardware.

Yep. The worst thing I've seen romanticized in my milieu though is poor mental health: for some reason it's quite "cool" to say you're depressed all the time, and while I know some of my friends are actually genuine, I'm not comfortable with the social pull toward the depression aesthetic. It's so weird.

His political views aside, it's well-known that the alpha/beta dynamic doesn't even apply to wolves, let alone humans, except for the ones that care a great deal about performing it.