Comment by ToyKeeper
6 hours ago
> zero evidence
That's a bold claim. It doesn't tell me there is zero evidence... hardly anything has zero evidence. It just tells me you either reject the evidence or haven't looked. It's not hard to check. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a nice summary and 82 references to get more details. But that's just a starting point.
> there are suddenly two types of people
This comment is pretty revealing. For almost any trait, there are way more than two types of people. Usually there's a whole spectrum with lots of diversity. It's a beautiful thing. What would be very unusual is if there was only one type of person, or only two types.
Even distinct "types" is a bit of a misleading concept. Instead of distinct types or buckets, most things have more of a cluster or nebula structure. Each individual member of a cluster is different, but has overall similarities, on average, to other members. There will usually be a fairly dense core, and then it gets more sparse with distance. And there will often be several clusters near each other, overlapping, so there is no clear boundary between one cluster and another. That is how descriptive categories work... nebulous clusters in thingspace, where that space is a many-dimensional abstract space with each trait having its own axis, and many degrees of each trait.
For convenience and efficiency, we use labels to refer to these clusters, but when deeper understanding is needed, or more nuanced communication, the labels stop being a useful simplification. It's like trying to dig out a splinter with a shovel; shovels are very useful, but they're way too coarse and blunt for something as precise as a splinter. A deep enough understanding requires us to more explicitly recognize the cluster structure and the multidimensional spectrum of diversity.
Don't mistake the map (the labels, or the "types" of people) for the territory (the rich variety of life).
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