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Comment by amelius

19 hours ago

99% of adults have abnormal faces, they all look different!

Ok, in that case it's safe to say that the normal is highly variant but generally follows a pattern. People generally have a nose in the center of their face so that'd be normal, but one on the forehead would be abnormal unless everyone suddenly also had forehead noses

Relevant history from the US Airforce in the 1940s when they tried to build a cockpit for the average pilot and failed

I find this an interesting take on the story

https://polkas.github.io/posts/cursedim/

  • This is also a good argument why "opinionated" designs like from Apple are a bad idea. The average user does not exist. Stop trying to turn us into one!

    • I have used an iPhone for 8 years and a macbook for 2 years. Every year the experience gets worse, like on schedule. This theory might explain what is happening!

      1 reply →

    • That’s different. Deciding you’re building a tool for a specific use-case is not related to “average users”.

      Tool companies manufacture claw hammers despite some people wanting a nail gun. You don’t try to make a thing flexible enough to be both a nail gun and a hammer.

      I’m a power user and I do all of my customization on my Linux desktop/laptop. I use an iPhone specifically because it’s locked down and don’t want a keyboard that has gone through no code review stealing all of my banking credentials.

  • From the article, it seems like even if we only consider one dimension, there'd be ~70% of pilots that are uncomfortable. I'd have thought to at least cover 1 standard deviation, thus covering 68% of "average" pilots. But with 10 dimension it'd still only cover measly 2% of them. If we go to 2 std (95%), the 10-power would be ~60%. Quite small but seems acceptable if the initial target is only ~30% of pilots.

    But of course this assume all variables are independent. Seems like we could actually push the tolerance much lower than this raw math would suggest.

I would hate to be one of the ~80 million people in the world who have identical faces