The challenge that is presented by AxALT and NAxALT, is that such statements are rarely statements of fact, but rather they are heuristics used in decision-making processes. Regardless of what internet debaters think, a great majority of decisions are made without consulting the latest academic research into the topic, and without engaging the mighty internet in a game of "let me find sources that support what I have decided to do/believe". People are generally much better at rationalizing a decision after it has been made than they are at arriving at a conclusion through research.

This means that both "AxALT" and "NAxALT" become a Pascal's wager of sorts. For those who are not familiar with this argument, Blaise Pascal made the argument that if you were an unbeliever, you had every incentive to act and think as a believer, as one had everything to gain, and nothing to lose by doing so. The reasoning being that if you act and think as a believer you will be welcomed into Paradise upon your death, if you do not you will go straight to hell.

Thus, the questions become:

A) If I adopt AxALT as my position what is the upside and the downside?

B) If I adopt "NAxALT" as my position, what is the upside and the downside?

A is clearly the most efficient route, as it permits decisions to be made with little investigation and investment. Furthermore, it shields one from idealism and naivete, as one requires a person or group to demonstrate through their actions that they are in fact outliers from your initial observation, or that your perception of the mean is an erroneous one. The vulnerability of A is that one may err in judgment in those cases where one assumes that a situation will reflect the mean, which is correct from a probability perspective, and the situation is in fact an outlier.

B, would be the more laborious option as it requires every decision to consist of data collection, data evaluation/analysis and then a decision to be made on a case by case basis. It also creates a situation in which your past observations cannot be adopted as a guideline for your present or future actions, as you must experience each case on its own. The major vulnerability of B however, is that the probability of error becomes much higher than in A. In A, one would have a 5 - 32% chance of being wrong, whereas in B one would have a 95% to 68% chance of being wrong.

For instance, a man man who adopts position A, who considers getting married for the second or third time, will evaluate the proposition as informed by his past experiences with divorce, and the consequences thereof. Whereas a man in the same situation who adopts position B, would not adopt his past observations as a guideline for his present decision-making, as "not all women are like my ex-wife", and thus his previous experience is in no way relevant information for his future decisions.

The unstated premise of "NAxALT" is simply that it is preferable to deal with the consequences of treating someone as a maximally positive outlier, as opposed to the consequences of treating them as being average. The Soul-mate myth is a prime example of this, in that if one treats all women as queens, nobody is offended, if one treats all women as common wenches, everyone is offended.

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