Single Answers Make You Stupid - by Duncan Sabien
Homo Sabiens
SubscribeSign in
Single Answers Make You Stupid<br>(shortpost)
Duncan Sabien<br>Jul 15, 2026
81
Share
Many of the people reading these essays will already be familiar with the story of hero rationalist Lt. Gilbert S. Daniels, so I’ll recount it very briefly:<br>1920s: Air Force needs to figure out how big a cockpit should be, when building airplanes; measures a bunch of pilots and settles on a standard.<br>1930s: Planes start to get faster and more complicated.<br>1940s: Planes are … falling out of the sky? A lot.<br>The Air Force, concerned that maybe the problem is that pilots have grown or something (downstream of increased nutrition, maybe?), measures a new batch of over four thousand pilots on well over a hundred dimensions. Conclusion: nope, pilots are basically the same size, problem must be something else.<br>Enter a young data scientist, fresh from Harvard, who takes the ten dimensions he believes to be most relevant to whether a pilot is a good fit for the cockpit (as opposed to being too large or too small). He checks to see how many pilots fall within 30% of the average on all ten dimensions, and discovers that (drum roll) zero of them do. The “average pilot” that the Air Force was building for literally did not exist, and the introduction of adjustable seats and belts (now familiar and taken for granted) largely fixed the problem.
I made a picture, once:
I made it because I was mad at people for saying stuff like “eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable” (which is true) as a blanket dismissal for any and all eyewitness testimony (which is dumb). Yes, if you don’t have the time or the resources to check and vet people, your default assumption should be “this person’s testimony is not particularly trustworthy.” But (it turns out) the right side of the bell curve, uh, does exist.<br>(So does the left!)
In highly visible and obvious domains, such as height, society has mostly figured out that different people are different. Mostly, people do not respond to a man claiming “I am five foot eight” by saying “FALSE: everybody knows that adult men in America are five foot nine, smdh, we’ve got so much data about this.”<br>But people do react that way to all sorts of other things. I run into people saying “we know” or “science has proven” blah blah blah all the time, without a shred of self-awareness that they are presenting an average as if it is representative of the entire graph.<br>(It’s not even a little bit true that frontal lobe development means people’s ability to reason about long-term consequences, and inhibit their own actions and desires, doesn’t come fully online until age twenty-five. That one’s completely false, downstream of a stupid game of telephone and wild misinterpretations of research. But even if it were true that the average human isn’t mature in this way until age twenty-five, [scroll back up and look at that graph again].)<br>When you figure out an average, and build systems around it that don’t take spread and variation into account, what happens is the planes start falling out of the sky.
There is no one single correct educational curriculum for taking a five-year-old and gradually turning them into an informed, well-rounded, and capable teen, and any single curriculum built around the averages might well fit literally no one.<br>There is no one single correct way for a society to think about sex and sexuality and relationships that works for everybody. Some people are gay and some people are straight and some people are ace and some people are bi and some people are pan and some people are the dean from Community. Some people deeply and inalterably need monogamous stability, and some people deeply and inalterably need multiple meaningful connections. Some people find things like degradation and impact play crucial and fulfilling, and some people would be immediately traumatized by it.<br>(Speaking of trauma: some people experience X and are forever haunted by the echoes of it; other people experience X and shrug and move on with their lives. There is no objectively correct amount of trauma to get from your personal history, and if your brain is in fact giving you the option then you should choose the minimum amount rather than clicker-training yourself into pain you didn’t have to experience!)<br>There is no (single) correct diet. There is no (single) correct exercise regimen. There is no (single) correct sleep hygiene. There is no (single) correct way to engage with social media, or to introspect and meditate, or to relate to your family, or to find fulfillment in work and hobbies.<br>Regardless of whether you buy [various attempts to describe the human experience such as the Kegan levels or the MTG colors], your society does contain people at Kegan 2, and people at Kegan 3, and people at Kegan 4, and people who are Red and people who are Green and people who are Blue/Black/White, and no one single way-of-life will work for anything...