The Loneliest Point

/ This is a story about designing institutions for people who don't exist, and what happens to the people who do. It starts with fighter jets, but it ends with graduate students and postdocs and tenure committees, all sitting in cockpits built for someone else. On a single day in the late 1940s, seventeen United States Air Force pilots crashed their planes. The planes were mechanically sound. The pilots were experienced. The weather was fine. For months, the Air Force had been watching its pilots lose control of aircraft that, by every diagnostic measure, worked perfectly. They checked the electronics, the hydraulics, the engines. Everything checked out. The official explanation, applied with the institutional creativity of a military bureaucracy, was "pilot error." Seventeen times in one day. The cockpits of those planes had been designed in 1926, when army engineers took measurements from a few hundred male pilots, averaged each body dimension, and used the result as a blueprint.…