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throwaway010718 | 6 years ago

Perhaps evolution has partially tuned the mixture of personality types that is optimal for us as a species. For example if there is a leadership gene then it should be ~10 times rarer than the follower gene. There could also be epigenomic (sp?) affects as well where one's leadership gene doesn't express itself unless there is a vacuum of leadership.

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jackcosgrove|6 years ago

Whatever the cause of this, personality traits are not evenly distributed. I know it's not necessarily an accurate system, but the MBTI is a consistent way of classifying personalities. The distribution of types varies a lot: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/my-mbti...

The biggest disparity seems to be between sensing and intuition, where sensing relies more on experience to make inferences, while intuition relies more on abstraction to make inferences.

Whether this is evolutionarily optimal or just a side effect of other forces I don't know.

jotakami|6 years ago

Aren’t all inferences based on abstraction, and all abstractions based on experience? Would it not be more correct to say that the difference here is degree rather than kind, where the intuitive types just have brains that are more active in building abstractions to explain their experiences?