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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure, but my intuition tells me there's half introverts, half extraverts. (introversion/extraversion is a spectrum).

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Its not just your intuiton the bell curve tops outs squarely in the middle of the two not with two nice peaks. I found this out looking in to Myers briggs(I think its very qustionable). People can never work out whether I am introvert or extrovert.

Yeah, Myers-Briggs seems only worthwhile if you’re an outlier on a particular trait. It’s almost misleading to report which side of the mean you’re on if you’re only a few percent to one side.

For example, I’m near the average on thinking vs. feeling and judging vs. perceiving, so I don’t consider those traits terribly important or informative. However, I am moderately more introverted than extraverted and significantly more intuitive than sensory. Then again, I don’t need a personality quiz to know that!

Any time you try to reduce people to a few traits—Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, whatever—you lose so much information that the exercise becomes nearly futile.

If someone asks, I say that I'm ITP. I deliberately forgot whether the last test I took showed me as slightly S or slightly N, and introspection doesn't reveal a preference between them.

- The notation for that is IxTP. - Introversion doesn't reveal the preference between the two values of the second letter because it measures the first letter. :)

- Thanks, that makes sense.

- Introspection, not introversion.

But that's the point... It's a continuous distribution meaning you probably fluctuate between introvert and extravert very smoothly with most of the population within the standard deviation. There will probably always be people that stay at the tail ends, but it's not average.

The shape of the distribution affects the value of the introvert/extrovert distinction pretty strongly, though. If it's strongly bimodal (so a random extrovert is very different from a random introvert), then it says a lot, while if it's unimodal with a small variance (so a random extrovert is only a little more extroverted than a random introvert) it doesn't say much.

And you are thus less likely to be friends with an introvert than an extrovert.

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