The gorilla debate never ended. Nobody won it. People just got bored and moved on to the next question.
In the first post of this series I argued that this is a problem with taking a question apart. It has no natural end. You can always split it once more. In the second I looked at the people who go first into the unknown, and ended on an uncomfortable observation: they often don’t come back out.
I was walking my dog the other day and asked myself how I would explain critical thinking to students. Not the textbook version. The version where you take a question apart and find out it was never one question. My dog had no opinion on the matter.
The example I landed on is a bit embarrassing: 100 men against a gorilla. If you missed it, the question started as a Reddit thread in 2020 and went properly viral in late April 2025. Could 100 unarmed men beat one silverback? TikTok argued, zoo directors gave interviews, and at least one US senator shared his view on the record.1
