We treat “the average human” as if it were a real, measurable entity —
a statistical center, a bell-shaped curve, a stable point around which everything clusters.
But this assumption comes from our models, not from the world itself.
Nearly all real-world systems — biological, cognitive, economic, technological, and computational — follow heavy-tailed distributions, not Gaussian ones.
Variance doesn’t contract toward the middle; it expands outward.
Outliers are not “rare exceptions.”
They are the structure.
The belief in an “average human” emerged because Gaussian models are mathematically convenient, politically comfortable, and easy to teach —
not because they describe reality.
When a system is embedded inside a larger uncontrolled environment, collapse and extreme dispersion are required, not accidental.
This is the foundation of RCC:
a geometric explanation for why long-range planning fails,
why drift accumulates,
and why human and model behavior doesn’t converge toward a center.
If someone knows an actually embedded system that maintains stability without external scaffolding, I’m interested.
But this assumption comes from our models, not from the world itself.
Nearly all real-world systems — biological, cognitive, economic, technological, and computational — follow heavy-tailed distributions, not Gaussian ones. Variance doesn’t contract toward the middle; it expands outward. Outliers are not “rare exceptions.” They are the structure.
The belief in an “average human” emerged because Gaussian models are mathematically convenient, politically comfortable, and easy to teach — not because they describe reality.
When a system is embedded inside a larger uncontrolled environment, collapse and extreme dispersion are required, not accidental. This is the foundation of RCC: a geometric explanation for why long-range planning fails, why drift accumulates, and why human and model behavior doesn’t converge toward a center.
If someone knows an actually embedded system that maintains stability without external scaffolding, I’m interested.