[AnthonyMouse]

> Is this related to something that's been said so far?

Are you considering what all of this is supposed to be an analogy for?

Suppose autism has different components, something like this:

https://getgoally.com/blog/autism-spectrum-wheel/

You rate someone on each factor using the same scale, e.g. a real number from 0 to 1, or a scale of 1 to 10. The scale is arbitrary but consistent.

Then someone whose "average" rating is 0.5 on a scale of 0 to 1 can be farther away from someone else whose "average" rating is 0.5 when there are more factors. On a linear scale two people both at 0.5 have distance zero. On a two dimensional scale, you could have one at (0, 1) and one at (1, 0) and then each of their averages is still 0.5 but their distance is ~1.4.

That's what we're talking about.