Post

I may push back a bit and say that, for most (and perhaps not all) mountains, when the fog clears we may find we’re not as high as we thought we would need to be to climb them. This worries me for reasons pertaining to future explorations and atrophy of valuable human skills.

I will show this quote to my first-semester students tomorrow. (Thin ice though when the German tries to tell Austrians something about mountains. 😬)

And sometimes the teleporter pops you up there and you find that this isn't a mountain at all, it's an extinct volcano. That's useful to know. Instead of trying to climb to a non-existent peak you should be planning how to explore the caldera (or perhaps just moving along elsewhere)

well the metaphor starts to warp but at some point the teleporter learns the intuitions the hikers had and can use it to teleport you to the right place. and then at some point it's not teleporting a human because the teleport goes into space, the moon, Mars, and a drone is better there.

not a teleporter. a black helicopter. didn't your mother tell you not to accept rides from black helicopters?

The very last sentence, by Litt, is the only one truly irking me. "If we can’t adapt, he added, “whose fault is that?”" I wonder. Whose fault would it be, bringing an overfunded sledgehammer to the foundations of a centuries-old endeavor without giving a damn and requiring it adapt in merely years?