Five Sigmas

Mainstream. Radical. Centrist. Extremist. These are the terms we use to talk about groups of people. The world of statistics uses another term: sigma. One sigma covers about 68% of a population. That's the most mainstream group. Two sigmas covers a bit more than 95% of the population, meaning that the second sigma included a new 33% of the population. That group isn't mainstream. They're more polarized in their thinking or their behavior or whatever it is that we're looking at.

Note that the 33% that are included by a second sigma are the people that are more extreme on both sides of the mainstream. If we're talking about messiness, then that 33% includes 16.5% who are more messy and 16.5% who are less messy than the mainstream.

What happens when we go to three or four sigmas? The third sigma group comprises only about 4% of the population - 2% on either side of the two sigma group. So those people are really messy or really neat. The fourth sigma group only has 0.26% of the population, and those people are just abominable slobs or neurotic neatnicks.

Statistics doesn't stop there. You can keep adding sigmas until you're blue in the face, although after a while you're talking about percentages that are really tiny. I'm interested in what happens when we get to five sigmas.

That next group, the five sigmas, make up 0.0063% of the population. That's one person in 16,000 or so. They're so messy or so neat that their life is severely impacted by their behavior. It's sad that they are so severely challenged, but there's another effect waiting in the wings for the six sigmas.

At this point, let's remember two things:

1. Populations don't actually fall into exact statistical curves like this. A bell curve is a general approximation. We're not doomed to always fill it out exactly. I'm using it for the purpose of illustrating a point about extremism.

2. The bell curve distribution can be roughly applied to many aspects of people (and other things besides). Height, weight, intelligence, run speed, introversion, aggression, you name it; measure it in a large population that is governed by biology and you're going to end up with a big mainstream element and smaller and smaller groups of extremists at either end of the spectrum that you've chosen.

What six sigmas face is having a feature about themselves which is very out of the ordinary. Most people don't have it and likely can't identify with it. Because we're social creatures, we like to relate to others. But if the mainstream can't identify with my extremism, I'm likely to seek out others who share it.

A couple hundred years ago, a man who was seven feet tall was a rarity. Just as rare today, but there were fewer people back then and they had a difficult time finding each other. In a collection of villages with a combined population of 16,000, there was perhaps one man that tall. If he wanted to interact with other people, he walked between villages. Worse, nothing about society was geared to support that man's height. The people in the mainstream didn't care to cater to his needs, nor to explore the advantages of his height. As far as the people in those villages were concerned, he was an oddity.

Today, men who are seven feet tall are still a rarity, but because our population is so much larger and because we can all find each other so much more easily (cars, planes, phones, email, etc.), the social support structures come into being. Today, there are a number of organizations for tall people. There are also organizations for short people. There are organizations for all sorts of people, according to extreme traits that they have. There are also organizations for extreme experiences that people have encountered, including surviving an exit from an aircraft by ejection seat.

That's the simple, straightforward side of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it has a darker side as well. Some number of anti-social people turn to crime or grief among their neighbors simply because it suits their desires. A smaller set of those anti-social people are interested in socializing with other like-minded people in order to commit grief upon the world. In this day and age, they can find each other, band together and create their own support structures.

So it is with every extremism that people can possess. As a population grows larger and makes communication between its members easier, there will be more and more cases of highly motivated extremists coming together, forming support groups, and reinforcing their own extremist views. Take any bad habit that you have and extend it out to an extreme. Now apply that extreme to a whole group of people who band together to reinforce that habit to the point where, to them, it becomes a good thing.

This is what has happened to a number of things in our society. The number of homosexuals in our society reached the tipping point. They have "come out of the closet" in sufficient numbers to establish a strong self-supporting structure. The word "gay" no longer means "happy", but "homosexual".

What about pedophiles? Without the stealth of the internet, their ability to interact would be severely diminished. Given enough pedophiles, we might begin to see pedophile zones spring up in remote areas of the country or of the world. If they're not already there.

The effect applies to the good as well, of course. The altruistic band together and do good works in our society. Huge numbers of volunteer and not-for-profit organizations exist in order to help others in our society. You hear about them all the time because they're always asking you for support.

Down the road, the question is one of how extreme the extremists will become? What about the people who are out at seven, eight and nine sigmas in their extremism? There are extremely few of them, but they feel very alienated from the rest of society. They might be geniuses beyond words who simply have no peers. When the five or six of them who are alive in the entire world find each other, something amazing might develop. Similarly, when the five or six socially-minded mass murderers come together, will they create an organization that will produce abominable results? Is that where Al Qaeda is today?

Extremist are motivated by the very fact that they are different from other people. They cannot find comfort in the everyday, commonplace events because they don't perceive those events the same way that the mainstream does. Motivated extremists can be a destabilizing effect on a society. The next time you casually toss aside an isolated, bizarre event or action by someone, consider what would happen if that person had a whole support structure behind their attitudes? With a large enough population, they'll have a club that they'll belong to for that very behavior.