When you think about the unlikelihood of existence, each person is equivalent to plucking a rational number out of the vast uncomputable febrile swamp of uncountably infinite irrationals.

It’s impossible, definitionally. Yet here we are. Here we all are.

Each human alive can create something that has never existed, think a thought that no one has ever thought, see something that no one has ever seen before.

The miracle is that so many scientists and Quiggins of the world can’t see the miracle, and deign to tell the ones of us who aren’t strictly bound by their pseudo-rationality that no miracle even exists.

Pondering it, I believe the reason I keep visiting places like Crooked Timber that have a panoply of the pseudo-educated is that it gives me something to push against — I can better find the flaws and also bright points of my own ratiocination by exposing myself to those who are supposed to be examples of intellectual rigor and probity but who are in reality oafs.

Quiggin knows so little; nothing of science, of anthropology, of sociology, of psychology, of epistemology, of history, of philosophy or human drives — in all of these he’s worse than someone utterly uneducated as he’s been mis-educated. He’s far worse off than someone who is utterly ignorant but willing to learn.

I could literally write a book about all the stupidity and ignorant assumptions embedded in the post to which I previously linked — all the willful misunderstandings, the obdurately and stupefyingly ignorant assumptions and the sophistry, but I have so much better things to do with my time than deal with his pusillanimous pap.

Posts like this are fundamentally moronic (but about what I’d expect of Crooked Timber), not because I disagree with Quiggin in the short term but because the long term is very long indeed and “never” is even longer.

More than 500 years out we have no idea of what will occur. The greatest prognosticator does not. Algorithms do not. And Quiggin — who does not rise even to the level of a frowzy fortune-teller — surely does not.

There is progress and there are plateaus, and one can be on a plateau for a very long time indeed before a new, viable climb appears. For instance, humans used stone tools only for somewhere between 500,000 and a million years — that’s from 100 to 200 times as long as the entirety of recorded human history.

There is nothing magical needed to undertake interstellar travel; merely many advances. How likely are those advances? I don’t know. There is not enough data to have any valid statistical basis for saying, despite Quiggin’s claims. If it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, I wouldn’t count out someone doing it in the long stretch of time, though.

This is why I hate Crooked Timber, and the people who think that way. Their imaginations are so tiny and their intellectual prowess so bounded. Someone told them they were bright, they got “educated,” but they don’t really know a fucking thing.

In the long vast sweep of time, many things will occur that people like Quiggin are certain will not. I don’t know what those are. No one does. But Quiggin’s certitude is that of a be-furred fool hooting that the copper ore is useless, and to throw it out, because it has no possible value since we already have all these nice rocks just laying about.

I think it most likely that in 5-50,000 years, if we manage to survive, we’ll find ways to significantly alter our bodies and to increase our lifespans, and with some advances in energy production, interstellar travel becomes a lot more feasible. Again, none of this is magic. It’s just things — like making a steel cooking pot in 10,000 BC — that we don’t yet know how to do.

Crooker Timber is terrible. I have a hard time understanding why I keep going back there but I can’t seem to stop. Such a bunch of tottering intellectual nitwits.

The French word for "thank you" is literally "merci", which I assume is essentially short for "I'm at your mercy." The power dynamics behind gratitude are hidden in plain sight; this probably used to be taken for granted.

— Malcolm🌊Ocean (@Malcolm_Ocean) December 3, 2018

This is how so much false etymology gets started.

I don’t have time to write out the whole damn history of one word this morning, but “merci” and its usage was influenced by Christianity around the 12th Century or so after originally coming into Old French by way of Latin, where its cognates “mercēd-” etc. originally meant something like “wages” and “price” and other commerce-related ideas.

Due to some Christian doctrine arguments, the word eventually came to mean something like “blessing” or “reward” (in a more metaphorical sense) and this is when it also became used as an expression meaning “thanks” in general French usage. In other words, the “merci” you were offering your benefactor as thanks was the reward or blessing (the payment) for the good deed done for you. It had no direct sense of being at someone’s mercy.

Please be aware that I am simplifying and eliding a whole lot of history here, but I hate false etymology and there is so very much of it.