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?
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.
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.