Humans are diverse.

I mean this not only in the sense of them coming all kinds of shapes, colours and sizes, having different world views and upbringings attached to them, but also in the sense of them having different psychological, neurological and cultural makeup. It does not sound like something that needs to explicitly said but apparently it needs to be said.

Of course first voices have realised that the usual population for studies is WEIRD but the problem goes deeper and further. Even if the conscientious scientist uses larger populations, more representative for the problem at hand, the conclusions drawn tend to ignore human diversity.

One of the culprits is the concept of "average" or at least a misuse of it. The average person has an ovary and a testicle. Completely meaningless to say, yet we are comfortable in hearing statements like "going to college raises your expected income by 70%" (number made up) and off to college we go. Statements like these suppress a great deal of relevant information, namely the underlying, inherent diversity in the population. Going to college may increase lifetime earnings, but the size of this effect might be highly dependent on some other factor like inherent cognitive ability and choice of major.

Now that is obvious, you might say, but virtually all research shows that this is not the case. It was surprising to see that the camel has two humps, that is, one part of the population seems to be incapable of learning programming, while the other is. And this can be determined by the answer to a single question. Research on exercise and diet is massively convoluted with questions about endurance/strength and carbs/fats. May this be because of ignoring underlying biological factors?

People are touting the coming age of personalised medicine as they see massively diminishing returns on generic medicine. Ever more diseases are hypothesised to have very specific causes for each person necessitating ever more specialised treatment. The effects of psychedelic substances are found to be dependant on the exact psychological makeup, e.g. cannabis causing psychosis only in individuals already at risk for such episodes.

There is no exact point to this rant. Just the observation that ever more statements are similar to saying "having unprotected sex with your partner has a high probability of leading to pregnancy" to homosexual man.