Lalo Martins

Here’s a small Outer Wilds moment that lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave.

(By the way, Outer Wilds is a game that has to be experienced for yourself without previous knowledge — and this article is packed with spoilers. If you haven't played yet, do us both a favor: bookmark this, stop reading right now, and come back after you finished it. Thanks.)

A YouTuber is reading Nomai text and says, with genuine admiration: “They were such an intelligent species.”

I’ve thought that myself many times. But hearing it phrased that way suddenly made it sound… off. Not wrong exactly. Just oddly racist.

And I don’t mean maliciously so. I mean in the boring, everyday cognitive-bias way.

What we’re doing in that moment is committing two classics at once: Hasty Generalization and Fundamental Attribution Error. We’re taking a very small, very selective sample and treating it as representative of an entire population — then attributing what we see to “what they are” rather than which slice we’re observing.

Because here’s the thing: when we read Nomai writing, we are not reading “the Nomai.” In that specific scene, for example, she was reading a dialogue between a pair of scientist–engineer sisters working on the Black Hole Forge. Prestige project. Elite institution. Literal cutting edge of their civilization.

The ratio between the number of residential spaces we see and the number of named Nomai we read about strongly suggests that we are only ever interacting with the tip of the iceberg. We hear about parents, families, kids, colleagues — but we don’t hear from most of them.

And that makes perfect sense. Writing murals, recording thoughts, documenting experiments — those are explicitly intellectual activities. Nobody is carving “d’oh” or “hehe she said hard” into stone walls meant to last millennia. Not because such Nomai didn’t exist, but because that’s not who leaves inscriptions behind.

Even at the edges it's still the elite. Escall makes a hasty mistake that kills most of his clan, then another that kills his group of survivors. But they were the clan's leader, and presumably led well up to that point. Idaea for me personally doesn't come off as the sharpest thorn in the vine, but he worked in a crucial prestige project, probably as a very capable engineer. Root is only seen carrying cores around and throwing rocks into lava, but he had a whole career in the Forge. Avens is borderline proto-Hearthian, but still entrusted to run a key piece of the project.

Once you notice this, it pops up elsewhere too — not just 281,042 years ago.

The notes we find from Hearthians? They’re from the genius astronomer Chert (property of Chert), the genius archeologist (and banjoist) Riebeck, the genius astrophysicist Hornfels, the genius pilot Feldspar, the zen genius quantum physicist/philosopher/artist Gabbro.

We don’t find notes by the guy who’s afraid of space. Or the guy who wants to cut down a tree because he fell from it once. Or the kid throwing rocks at ghost matter and wishing for a ghost matter gun.

And yet we don’t conclude that “Hearthians are a species of geniuses.”

Why not?

Because we see the rest of them. We live among them. We have context. With the Nomai, we don’t—and our brains quietly fill in the gaps with essence instead of selection bias.

This is how hasty generalization turns into something that feels like a profound truth about a group, when it’s really just a mirror held up to our own sampling errors.

Outer Wilds doesn’t endorse this mistake. It gently exposes it.

The game never tells us the Nomai were “more intelligent.” It shows us their intellectual elite, frozen in time, stripped of context, and presented without the mundane noise of everyday life. And if we’re not careful, we mistake that curation for character.

Which is, inconveniently, how real-world prejudice so often works too.

The universe didn’t select the Nomai because they were smarter. We selected which Nomai survived in the record — and then told a story about what that must mean.

And once you see that, it becomes very hard to unsee it.