But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter.

Even if we can’t foresee the unforeseeable, it’s possible to project a future reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to what actually happens. It

Occam’s Razor: the philosophical argument that the best hypothesis is the one involving the lowest number of assumptions.

Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions.

genius as timeless. “What ages [poorly], it seems, are ideas that trend to the clever, the new, or the merely personal,” Saunders continues. “What gets dated, somehow, is that which is too ego inflected—that hasn’t been held up against the old wisdom, maybe, or just against some innate sense of truth, and rigorously, with a kind of self-abnegating fervor. Again and again some yahoo from 1863 can be heard to be strenuously saying the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal thing—and that crap rings so hollow when read against Lincoln or Douglass. It gives me real fear about all of the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal things I’ve been saying all my life.”

The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.

I suspect that whoever gets arbitrarily selected to represent turn-of-the-twenty-first-century literary greatness is—at the moment—either totally unknown or widely disrespected.

In one hundred years, it’s possible that the contemporary novel best illustrating media alienation will be something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,

realize this sounds like advice from a fortune cookie. In fact, I suspect my whole line of reasoning reads like a collection of ineffectual riddles: “The most amazing writer of this generation is someone you’ve never heard of, representing a subculture we don’t even recognize, expressing ideas that don’t signify what they appear to mean.”

goal is to think about the present in the same way we think about the past, wholly aware that such mass consideration can’t happen until we reach a future that no longer includes us.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

It’s possible everyone could decide to reverse how we’re supposed to remember 1977.

Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities.

The reason this anecdote is so significant is the sequence. It’s easy to discover a new planet and then work up the math proving that it’s there; it’s quite another to mathematically insist a massive undiscovered planet should be precisely where it ends up being.

In terms of speculating on the likelihood of our collective wrongness, Tyson’s distinction is huge. If you remove the deepest question—the question of why—the risk of major error falls through the floor.

This kind of willful, unilateral agreement is not unique to famous scientists—most of the unfamous scientists would agree, too. You’re not really a scientist if you don’t. The core components of science—say, the structure of DNA or the speed of light or the weight of carbon—have to be uniform. This is a card game that can be played with only one specific deck, and that should increase our confidence in what we believe to be true. If everyone is using the same information to do different things and still coming to the same reliable conclusions, there isn’t much room for profound wrongness.

other words, people who don’t know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility.

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously. I’m not Mr. Robot.

Many of them have already been infected by postmodernism and believe that knowledge is socially constructed, and they believe we’ll have intellectual revolutions forever.

(Kurzweil openly aspires to create an avatar of his long-dead father, using scraps of the deceased patriarch’s DNA and exhaustive notes about his father’s life).

One side of the debate argues that time is happening in a linear fashion. This is easy to understand. The other side argues that all time is happening at once. This is difficult to comprehend.

“It must be terrifying to think the world is actually like that.” “What do you mean?” I ask. My memory of what she says next is sketchy, but it’s something along the lines of: It must be terrifying to view the world from the perspective that most people are wrong, and to think that every standard belief is a form of dogma, and to assume that reality is not real.

we need to embrace the 10 percent that seems forthright, lest we feel like life is a cruel, unmanageable joke. This is the root of naïve realism. It’s not so much an intellectual failing as an emotional sanctuary from existential despair.

If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?

When you see the phrase “You’re doing it wrong,” the unwritten sentence that follows is: “And I’m doing it right.” Which has become the pervasive way to argue about just about everything, particularly in a Web culture where discourse is dominated by the reaction to (and the rejection of) other people’s ideas, as opposed to generating one’s own.

Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” For philosophy students, the essay is about the conflict between objectivity and subjectivity,