Dear Yuri! You have touched on a large range of issues. The level of self-esteem, self-assessment criteria, quantitative traits qualities, comparative characteristics of human abilities ... In these matters, a lot of individuality, personification. I'm sure, in order not to make a mistake you need to thoroughly know himself (the ancient wisdom). And each person must thoroughly learn about the world. Then the judgment will be closer to reality.

Vladimir

Is it the 'position' in a distribution (e.g. millions of people involved) or the interaction in that distribution ( e.g. a couple of hundred people involved) that counts?

I think that both distributions count. Suppose, one is in top-10% in the world characteristics (of 7 billion people) but only top-30% in his village (which is full of talents of this sort; let say, a village in Kenya for the skill of long-distance running). Then it is difficult to have success in a village, but better to go globally.

At the same time, psychological characteristics may count more in a small group (where person interacts mostly). But again, a signal to change environment if all is going bad in this group. For example, a unique honest person among the liars.

In other words, "white crow" is an extreme position. (Photo source: http://www.birdsandblooms.com/blog/albino-bird-a-white-crow/ )

Dear Yuri! You have touched on a large range of issues. The level of self-esteem, self-assessment criteria, quantitative traits qualities, comparative characteristics of human abilities ... In these matters, a lot of individuality, personification. I'm sure, in order not to make a mistake you need to thoroughly know himself (the ancient wisdom). And each person must thoroughly learn about the world. Then the judgment will be closer to reality.

Vladimir

Dear all

I think it is the time our human understand our today’s location and future location as a person in the multidimensional distribution of the space on the earth. From extinct species, our human is on the power top. From the species which we cannot deal with such as cockroach, we lose our powerful position. Our future location is decided by our human. We are making robot more and more powerful. So now it is the time we contemplate the location we will locate in future.

Dear Chun, you are thinking globally! It is also very important to see how human civilization can harmonically coexist with nature. Good topic for environment strategy.

Why can't we deal with cockroach? Why are we on the top on extinct species?

However, here I am more concerned whether human individuals know how they are related to other human individuals in different skills and abilities. This is also important for making smart individual goals.

Dear all

Every individual has his own space and behavior orbit. The space and the orbit decided by the power (wealth) that he possessed in the realistic world.  

Chun, do you think that only power is responsible for our relative position in human hierarchy? Well, I have an article where the role of power is discussed and power game is analysed; see section 4 in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271499741_Elements_of_Structural_Economics

However, not a unique power dominates in human society. Jacque Attali said that historically there were three dominant powers: military, religious and financial. As for animals, I guess it is only physical strength.(However, advantage in other skills, like to smell or see at large distance, allows weaker animals to survive.) But human societies can have altruism, support weak and poor, respect wisdom and do other things different from animals.

Article Elements of Structural Economics

Do we understand our location as a person in the multidimensional distribution of characteristics of humans?

I think in very near future or now we can know our score / index where we are in the continuum of multidimensional distribution of human characteristics.  Reason being with the proliferation of technologies like smart devices attached / wrapped around our body (to measure our physical attributes like weight, blood pressure, sugar level etc.), quick assessment tools that can measure our psychological, social, intellectual attributes, Internet of Things (IoT) that can collect & process various types of surrounding signals received at the edge, big data analytics that can provide a lot of real time dynamic insights as well as extrapolation / prediction of our future scenarios / outcomes in different timelines etc. can help us to make better decisions that best suit our strengths / characteristics.

Dear all

Material world under the containment of wealth power, spiritual world also cannot escape the impact. is money the center of gravity or isn’t ?

The technical possibility to measure physical parameters and to share them in a network is indeed increasing (that is what Hun was saying). There are also tests to measure intellectual parameters like IQ, and one might know own standing.

However, this does not apply to psychological parameters. Just try to think about yourself: in what % are you in these binary dimensions: a) aggressive - timid, b) honest - liar, c) extravert - introvert, d) rational - emotional, e) lazy - hardworker. There are many more. Once I was passing a test (for tourists on a street) with computer giving such position in maybe 20 characteristics after graphological expertise of one's signature. Interestingly, when I repeated it in 3 years, the result was substantially different. I still do not know if this was an evolution of my character or (more likely) an error of measurement.

I would say that it is not easy to learn an objective truth about one's difference from the mean in traits of character. Here the problem is not only to measure one's traits, but also to know what is the mean.  Subgroup means differ a lot across cultures. Just imagine one honest person surrounded by 100 liars, or 1 liar among 100 honest - both will look like "black sheep among white". And the mean character (mix of both) will also be biased in both groups.

The power of money (as Chun says) also puts an external pressure to the selection of the most fit character. In the Middle Ages (11-14th cent. in Europe), under the dominance of military power of knights and religious power of orders, honesty was a much more valuable trait of character.

In fact, collisions of different characters is the basis of many fiction books and films. We do not know about relative position of characters of people that we meet (apart from few who can read body language perfectly) and this creates a lot of problems in interaction between people. Very often psychologists spend a lot of time to find out problems in families or groups working together, and then to solve them.

Perhaps the question is indeed too complicated. Economists think that we should know all about ourselves (preferences, skills, etc) and even about the others. But in reality some features are even difficult to measure, while for others there may be asymmetric information.

There are also scientific articles on such topic, but they study not overall but only partial pictures. Sometimes it is in medicine: what psychological features correlate with what disease.

Some studies are in psychology. Here is the frequency of different psychological types in population: https://mypersonality.info/personality-types/population-gender/ There is a test to pass, but  do not know if it is for free: https://www.personalitymax.com/

There is a study about addiction to internet, which is not homogeneous across psychological groups: http://mail.encognitive.com/files/Internet%20addiction%20among%20Chinese%20adolescents--%20prevalence%20and%20psychological%20features.pdf

There is a study in what age people feel more happy: http://www.elitovar.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Deaton_age_subjectiveWB.pdf