Lets say you get abducted by aliens.
They inform you that they want to make contact with human individuals, not the entire humanity. They have a limited telepathy and can “scan” for human mental traits like spiritualistic / non-spiritualistic, artistic / non-artistic, introverted / extroverted, anxious / chill, low / med / high IQ, technology oriented, business savvy, mathematically gifted, socially gifted, scientific, etc.
They want you to define traits that would make encounters go smoothly and be representative of humans.
Without knowing anything about those aliens or their interests. What is your answer?
My immediate instinct is to lead them towards people like agorophobes or alien fetishists, because that would be funny. They should maybe have asked someone else.
A serious answer is that it probably matters more how they make contact than who they contact, if they want representative. People hide their true colours in big moments like that, so if they can make it less obvious they’re aliens that’s good.
Cool under pressure maybe? I expect a lot of people would freak out upon meeting an alien which is probably pretty inefficient. And smart is presumably a benefit. That’s not really representative of most humans though lol
What kind of person would be cool under preasure? For example, in my experience people who take cool headed action in a accident scenes are very varying. Some people just go in to a no bullshit mode and execute a plan they really haven’t even thought of. Emotion take a break.
Would this kind of “automated” reaction be a correct way to go?
Are there several forms cool headedness? Analytical cool headedness?
It sounds like they want a representative sample, which isn’t something I’d be confident in my ability to help them with directly, so I’d advise them to first scan for a person who’s very experienced in statistical sampling and to then work with that person to determine a strategy that will meet their goals.
If they weren’t on board with that plan, then I’d see if they were willing to share their target sample size. If I didn’t have an option for the count I would assume they would be contacting 1% of the population (80 million people). I’d also let them know that being representative and selecting for traits that will make encounters go smoothly are conflicting goals, so I’m prioritizing for representation and they can figure out the “please don’t pull a shotgun out, human!” trait on their own. Depending on all that, I’d recommend an approach that accounted for as much of the following as possible.
- gender (male, female, non-binary)
- race
- culture and sub-culture (so this would include everything from religion to music to hobbies)
- profession
- age, broken down into micro-generations
- mix of neurotypical and neurodivergent
- different varieties of neurodivergence
- range of intelligences
Wouldn’t take race in there, unless if you wanted the alien to treat the human differently because they’re of a different race, which comes with its problems.
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That is a strength of humans: diversity in backgrounds, thoughts, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, and capable of working together regardless.
Is it? That seems like a bold statement with no other technological species to compare against.
Genetically, we’re actually a low-diversity species, because there was some serious bottlenecking in deep prehistory.
Nobody who is an aliens conspiracy person, they wouldn’t be believed. Schizophrenia I think would let someone receive telepathy but again, unreliable.
If they can abduct me, and communicate with me, why do they want to communicate telepathically with the rest of humanity, why not contact using technology, our technology? If they were so very different there is no way they could communicate that idea to me clearly.
Run alien Run!
I would probably suggest this option too, but keeping it individual level gives some hope.
You’re probably joking, but this is where I landed. We’re no where near ready to join a galactic community.
You can either get something that is representative, so the median, by choosing mid traits (mid spiritualistic, mid artistic, mid intro/extroverted, med IQ), or by choosing at random. Everything else would not be representative, and depending on your own traits, you would be biased - eg. non spiritualistic, non artistic, introverted, anxious, mid IQ, technology oriented, but also trans and depressed. Some of those I would obviously not see as an average trait, but being atheist and non-spiritualistic would definitely be on my list, despite not being the actual norm.
