What I mean by that is I doubt there is even one single truly “neurotypical” person on this Earth whose brain is actually average in every important dimension of brain variation.
In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance rates, clothing sizes, The Dow Jones – all these measurements are based around the concept of an “average.
High-dimensional data has this property: it is extremely unlikely that there will be a data point situated at the exact center.
It’s the high dimensionality that’s important here. One person might be at some sort of average on •one• dimension, but for them to be at the average on •all• dimensions grows exponentially less likely as the number of dimensions increases.
It’s like trying to roll all threes with a set of dice. Odds of that with one die? 1 in 6. Odds with two dice? 1 in 36. Odds with 10 dice? 1 in ~60 million.
Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.
[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]
None of the above is even proper neuroscience or psychology. It’s just a framing of the question, a way to avoid ridiculous assumptions and broken approaches, a way to avoid hurting people.
Variation is normal. Let’s expect it, design for it, work •with• it — in others, and in ourselves.
“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?
Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.
Several replies think thoughts along the lines of this one from @dalias, and I strongly agree. The •most• neurodivergent who simply cannot conform to narrow, normative expectations are doing the hard work of creating flexibility for •everyone• (see “curb cut effect”).
@lispi314@udongein.xyz @karlhigley@recsys.social I have a pet theory that there's really no such intrinsic thing as neurotypicality, just susceptibilities to being forced into various kinds of conformity and eases of performing it.
We’ve often use the word “neurotypical” to mean “neither autistic nor ADHD.” That might be useful as a shorthand, I guess, but it’s that mode of thought I’m specifically arguing against here: creating a single catch-all category defined as a negative, calling it “normal,” and assuming that it fits most people.
That doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy or helpful.
A lot of conversations about neurodivergence take the form of the first image below. I’m arguing to adopt the framing of the second image instead (except 100- or 1000-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional).
We’ve identified a few clusterings in a space of extraordinary and beautiful variation, and given those clusterings names. How useful those names are! How little they capture, even so! How much variation remains unnamed! How much variation must exist within every human being!
There is variation in everyone, but society / context / environment makes that variation more burdensome for some than for others. “Neurotypical” is not a thing that anyone •is•, but rather an archetype that human systems are designed for / evolved around.
When we recognize that “neurotypical” is an archetype and not an actual person, we can reach the same insight that the Air Force reached: you don’t build things to some single optimal set of “normal” dimensions; you make things more adjustable, flexible, accommodating of variation.
Wow, this is an awesome thread! I didn't know this stuff even crossed your mind, and then you suddenly just lay it all out and obliterate the silly assumptions people make. As someone who does fit (a bit awkwardly at times) in the clusters we have defined as ADHD and autism, I really appreciate this perspective!
@hosford42 I’ve never found either autism or ADHD diagnostic lsits to describe me all that well, but I’ve certainly spent enough of my life feeling •divergent• for this all to be on my mind! (I often use the phrase “my as-yet-unnamed neurodivergence.”)
Like many autistic people, I have encyclopedic recall for things that interest me -- neurodivergence being one of those topics. If you ever want to explore possible matches for your particular neurodivergence, I'd be happy to share that collected information.
@hosford42 That’s a kind offer! I don’t really feel like I’m in need of a diagnostic label: I have a pretty good sense of how my brain works, and I’m quite comfortable with it and generally able to navigate the world both effectively and happily. Now 13-year-old Paul probably could have used that…!
(I’ve heard mention of some people arguing for “giftedness” as a form of neurodivergence in itself, and although that term really gives me the ick, I suspect the category may be a good fit. Among other things: “encyclopedic recall for areas of interest” describes me too! I remember doing one autism self-diagnosis where the entire first section on “giftedness” was all, “yup, yup, oh wow, yup! Maybe I am…” and then the •all• the subsequent sections were just “nope, nope, nope, not that either, nope….”)
this is very much my reasoning for why I don't fully buy that cis het people exist. I mean practically speaking they do and they're the majority, but the ideals might not actually describe anyone.
I think even if you were to try clustering things, it would be multiple clusters, not one big cluster around the means of all the parameters.
Adjustable seats is a great metaphor for freedom in general. You can't paternalistically design society for everyone even if you wanted to.
@hosford42 @thomasjwebb That just made me realize that for as chilling Elysium was for me, it's likely to have made others equally aroused thinking about having so much power.
@thomasjwebb Strong agree. I’m cis het on paper — yet have enough gender noncomformance to have caused me personal pain and distress in my peer interactions, and to have forced me to fight hard for my own gender identity against the current. I don’t feel entirely comfortable claiming the banner of “queer” because that word importantly captures hardships I’ve never known and struggles that are not mine…but I’ve always felt more at ease in queer-friendly spaces, because I know that I too am more likely to be safe and accepted there too.
"Autigender" was an interesting word I learned in this space. I'm cis het male, sure, but I very much do it *my* way, not the standard one. I'm not performatively male. I'm just me, and that happens to line up mostly with those descriptors most of the time.
While I very much like the goal of "make the seats adjustable", I would really like to see a little more acceptance of the (neuro)diversity of teachers --- there used to be an attitude that a student should figure out how they can learn from a teacher --- now it is all on the teacher to figure out how to accommodate the student.*
Maybe there's some way to talk about meeting in the middle?
* You wouldn't believe the amount of work they are now demanding I do to accommodate hypothetical students who have never actually asked for changes. I'm getting very close to saying "F*** it. I have other, more important things to do." I do like teaching. I enjoy it. A lot of students love my class. Many have said that it was their favorite class they took in college. But teaching is supposed to be one small part of my job (if at all). The extra work being demanded is interfering with the rest of the important things that I do. At some point, these burdens are going to preclude me being willing to do the work.
“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?
Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.
Accommodation should always be a two-way street. A dialog, not a declaration. The abilities and resources of *both* parties have to be taken into account.
I saw this firsthand when an artist friend of mine didn't provide alt text. Someone chewed her out for it, and then she didn't feel comfortable posting her art anymore. What the other person failed to account for was that the artist herself is *also* disabled, and struggles to find the words to describe images. The end solution that made her feel comfortable posting online again was when people made it clear to her that it was okay to post and then ask for help with the alt text.
Whether someone is officially classified as disabled or not, there are always things they can't do. The whole point in accommodation is to treat *all* people as having intrinsic value, and to make room for each other as best we can.
I wonder what this means for something like neurology, where we don't even know how many dimensions there are, or if that number is even fixed and not its own dimension!!!
@alter_kaker Yeah, just vast terra icognita; most of our understanding of the mind is still “here be dragons.”
The things is, my “average is highly unlikely to exist” argument doesn’t depend on knowing any of that. If we assume the space of possibly variations is highly multidimensional, then it’s basically QED without any further knowledge needed!
Well, but we typically talk about human things being typical more with standard deviations than with exact numbers anyway. If "neurotypical" is anything in the first standard deviation, you're WAY more likely to get multiple dimensions in the same target. Given a normal distribution, about 2/3 of the population will be "typical" on any given trait.
@michaelc OK, if one sigma is “typical” (probably too broad to actually accommodate people well, but let’s roll with it) and we still assume a measly 20 dimensions of brain variation, then we’re up to a whopping 0.03% of the population being “neurotypical” — an extraordinarily rare condition, even under a ridiculously broad definition.
I've heard it phrased as "everyone has some neurodivergent traits, but not everyone is Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD".
When someone says "everyone is a little bit autistic", wherever they are coming from, it comes off as minimizing, dismissive, invalidating, or all three.
I don't think that's what Paul was saying, though. We have identified these categories because those of us who fall in them (like me) often struggle more than others to conform to societal expectations. But that doesn't mean that anybody is "normal". You can say nobody is normal, or nobody is typical, without denying that outliers exist and face greater challenges in society.
One slightly more blunt stat I tend to mention is that the average person has about one testicle. Which is more about bimodal distributions than your point about high dimensionality. But it still tends to rattle the cage whenever I hear people trying to optimize for the "average case" without much introspection about it.
this is in so ways why we as a species are 'failing'. we have built a society on an average (determined by the most privileged among us).
racial average. gendered average. abled average. prosperity average. medical average.
none of this averaging works because on an individual basis it is never accurate. we are all a bunch of overlapping blobs and spending all of this time trying to precicely categorize each and every one of us into specific boxes is both a gigantic waste of time and an oppressive tool that guarantees our needs won't be met.
this is of course extremely relevant in the conversation (and widespread adoption by those in power) around AI, as one big gigantic averaging tool.
Yes. And note the “average” here isn’t always even truly the midpoint of the population, but rather the locus of power: much of society is built around men, for example, when being male is not even typical.
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •What I mean by that is I doubt there is even one single truly “neurotypical” person on this Earth whose brain is actually average in every important dimension of brain variation.
2/
Aaron reshared this.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
99percentinvisible.org/episode…
3/
On Average - 99% Invisible
99% Invisiblereshared this
Charlie Stross, Aaron e Mre. Dartigen [maker mode] reshared this.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •High-dimensional data has this property: it is extremely unlikely that there will be a data point situated at the exact center.
It’s the high dimensionality that’s important here. One person might be at some sort of average on •one• dimension, but for them to be at the average on •all• dimensions grows exponentially less likely as the number of dimensions increases.
It’s like trying to roll all threes with a set of dice. Odds of that with one die? 1 in 6. Odds with two dice? 1 in 36. Odds with 10 dice? 1 in ~60 million.
4/
Aaron reshared this.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.
[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]
5/
Aaron reshared this.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •My general framework for thinking about this stuff:
- Brains vary a lot, in a lot of different ways.
- We have names for a few variations, or common patterns of variation. That can be useful, but it’s hardly complete.
- There’s a wealth of as-yet-unnamed neurodivergences out there.
- It’s all but certain that •everyone’s• mind is atypical is one way or another.
- Comparison with, aspiration to, or forced conformance to the nonexistent “average” mind is unhelpful, frequently harmful.
- Embracing variation is the only reasonable (or humane) approach.
6/
reshared this
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Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •In that story of the Air Force measurements, the research team came up with a completely radical suggestion:
Make the seats adjustable.
WHOA 🤯
“Adjustable seats.” seems to me like a great starting point for thinking about variations in human minds.
7/
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •None of the above is even proper neuroscience or psychology. It’s just a framing of the question, a way to avoid ridiculous assumptions and broken approaches, a way to avoid hurting people.
Variation is normal. Let’s expect it, design for it, work •with• it — in others, and in ourselves.
8/
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?
Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.
9/
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Several replies think thoughts along the lines of this one from @dalias, and I strongly agree. The •most• neurodivergent who simply cannot conform to narrow, normative expectations are doing the hard work of creating flexibility for •everyone• (see “curb cut effect”).
hachyderm.io/@dalias/112199018…
10/
Cassandrich (@dalias@hachyderm.io)
Cassandrich (Hachyderm.io)Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Per replies, something I need to clarify:
We’ve often use the word “neurotypical” to mean “neither autistic nor ADHD.” That might be useful as a shorthand, I guess, but it’s that mode of thought I’m specifically arguing against here: creating a single catch-all category defined as a negative, calling it “normal,” and assuming that it fits most people.
That doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy or helpful.
11/
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •A lot of conversations about neurodivergence take the form of the first image below. I’m arguing to adopt the framing of the second image instead (except 100- or 1000-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional).
We’ve identified a few clusterings in a space of extraordinary and beautiful variation, and given those clusterings names. How useful those names are! How little they capture, even so! How much variation remains unnamed! How much variation must exist within every human being!
12/
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •There is variation in everyone, but society / context / environment makes that variation more burdensome for some than for others. “Neurotypical” is not a thing that anyone •is•, but rather an archetype that human systems are designed for / evolved around.
When we recognize that “neurotypical” is an archetype and not an actual person, we can reach the same insight that the Air Force reached: you don’t build things to some single optimal set of “normal” dimensions; you make things more adjustable, flexible, accommodating of variation.
/end
Aaron
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Paul Cantrell
in reply to Aaron • • •I’ve never found either autism or ADHD diagnostic lsits to describe me all that well, but I’ve certainly spent enough of my life feeling •divergent• for this all to be on my mind! (I often use the phrase “my as-yet-unnamed neurodivergence.”)
Aaron
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Paul Cantrell
in reply to Aaron • • •@hosford42
That’s a kind offer! I don’t really feel like I’m in need of a diagnostic label: I have a pretty good sense of how my brain works, and I’m quite comfortable with it and generally able to navigate the world both effectively and happily. Now 13-year-old Paul probably could have used that…!
(I’ve heard mention of some people arguing for “giftedness” as a form of neurodivergence in itself, and although that term really gives me the ick, I suspect the category may be a good fit. Among other things: “encyclopedic recall for areas of interest” describes me too! I remember doing one autism self-diagnosis where the entire first section on “giftedness” was all, “yup, yup, oh wow, yup! Maybe I am…” and then the •all• the subsequent sections were just “nope, nope, nope, not that either, nope….”)
Aaron
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Thommy
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •this is very much my reasoning for why I don't fully buy that cis het people exist. I mean practically speaking they do and they're the majority, but the ideals might not actually describe anyone.
I think even if you were to try clustering things, it would be multiple clusters, not one big cluster around the means of all the parameters.
Adjustable seats is a great metaphor for freedom in general. You can't paternalistically design society for everyone even if you wanted to.
CM Thiede
in reply to Thommy • • •Aaron
in reply to CM Thiede • • •CM Thiede
in reply to Aaron • • •@hosford42 @thomasjwebb That just made me realize that for as chilling Elysium was for me, it's likely to have made others equally aroused thinking about having so much power.
#Elysium #Dystopia #Utopia #Movies
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Thommy • • •Strong agree. I’m cis het on paper — yet have enough gender noncomformance to have caused me personal pain and distress in my peer interactions, and to have forced me to fight hard for my own gender identity against the current. I don’t feel entirely comfortable claiming the banner of “queer” because that word importantly captures hardships I’ve never known and struggles that are not mine…but I’ve always felt more at ease in queer-friendly spaces, because I know that I too am more likely to be safe and accepted there too.
Aaron
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •"Autigender" was an interesting word I learned in this space. I'm cis het male, sure, but I very much do it *my* way, not the standard one. I'm not performatively male. I'm just me, and that happens to line up mostly with those descriptors most of the time.
@thomasjwebb
Redish Lab
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •RE: hachyderm.io/@inthehands/11576…
@inthehands
While I very much like the goal of "make the seats adjustable", I would really like to see a little more acceptance of the (neuro)diversity of teachers --- there used to be an attitude that a student should figure out how they can learn from a teacher --- now it is all on the teacher to figure out how to accommodate the student.*
Maybe there's some way to talk about meeting in the middle?
* You wouldn't believe the amount of work they are now demanding I do to accommodate hypothetical students who have never actually asked for changes. I'm getting very close to saying "F*** it. I have other, more important things to do." I do like teaching. I enjoy it. A lot of students love my class. Many have said that it was their favorite class they took in college. But teaching is supposed to be one small part of my job (if at all). The extra work being demanded is interfering with the rest of the important things that I do. At some point, these burdens are going to preclude me being willing to do the work.
Paul Cantrell
2025-12-22 17:36:05
Aaron
in reply to Redish Lab • • •@adredish
Accommodation should always be a two-way street. A dialog, not a declaration. The abilities and resources of *both* parties have to be taken into account.
I saw this firsthand when an artist friend of mine didn't provide alt text. Someone chewed her out for it, and then she didn't feel comfortable posting her art anymore. What the other person failed to account for was that the artist herself is *also* disabled, and struggles to find the words to describe images. The end solution that made her feel comfortable posting online again was when people made it clear to her that it was okay to post and then ask for help with the alt text.
Whether someone is officially classified as disabled or not, there are always things they can't do. The whole point in accommodation is to treat *all* people as having intrinsic value, and to make room for each other as best we can.
@inthehands
standev
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •MinmiTheDino
in reply to standev • • •And when “normal” occurs only 1 in 2000 times…aren’t they the weirdos at that point? 🤣🤣
Aaron
in reply to MinmiTheDino • • •@minmi
"It's weird to be normal," will now be one of the things I say to people who expect normalcy. lol
@standev @inthehands
MinmiTheDino
in reply to Aaron • • •@hosford42
Yesssss
@standev @inthehands
Marc Trius
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Paul Cantrell
in reply to Marc Trius • • •@alter_kaker
Yeah, just vast terra icognita; most of our understanding of the mind is still “here be dragons.”
The things is, my “average is highly unlikely to exist” argument doesn’t depend on knowing any of that. If we assume the space of possibly variations is highly multidimensional, then it’s basically QED without any further knowledge needed!
Aaron
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •I kept thinking of hypervectors as I read all this. The way cosine similarity drops off exponentially faster with increasing dimensionality.
@alter_kaker
Michael J. Coffey
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Paul Cantrell
in reply to Michael J. Coffey • • •cratermoon
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •I've heard it phrased as "everyone has some neurodivergent traits, but not everyone is Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD".
When someone says "everyone is a little bit autistic", wherever they are coming from, it comes off as minimizing, dismissive, invalidating, or all three.
Luke Kanies
in reply to cratermoon • • •Aaron
in reply to Luke Kanies • • •@lkanies @cratermoon
I don't think that's what Paul was saying, though. We have identified these categories because those of us who fall in them (like me) often struggle more than others to conform to societal expectations. But that doesn't mean that anybody is "normal". You can say nobody is normal, or nobody is typical, without denying that outliers exist and face greater challenges in society.
@inthehands
huntingdon
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •wrosecrans
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •Perrin42
in reply to wrosecrans • • •Due to the existence of pregnant people, the average human body has more than one skeleton inside it.
Hazel-Quercus 🟡⚪🟣⚫
in reply to Paul Cantrell • • •beautifully communicated and thought out
'average isn't real'
this is in so ways why we as a species are 'failing'. we have built a society on an average (determined by the most privileged among us).
racial average. gendered average. abled average. prosperity average. medical average.
none of this averaging works because on an individual basis it is never accurate. we are all a bunch of overlapping blobs and spending all of this time trying to precicely categorize each and every one of us into specific boxes is both a gigantic waste of time and an oppressive tool that guarantees our needs won't be met.
this is of course extremely relevant in the conversation (and widespread adoption by those in power) around AI, as one big gigantic averaging tool.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Hazel-Quercus 🟡⚪🟣⚫ • • •@coppercrush
Yes. And note the “average” here isn’t always even truly the midpoint of the population, but rather the locus of power: much of society is built around men, for example, when being male is not even typical.