Gary Marcus

is it really so hard to understand why catastrophe is far more plausible than outright literal extinction? black plague killed about a third of the population, not all of it. and that was before sanitation. covid killed less than 1% even nuclear war would not lead to extinction. i have no idea why doomers harp on absolute extinction when even the mostly calamitous things humans ever experienced are nothing like that; stories about actual extinction seem like fairy tales that ignore history, human geographical spread, human genetic diversity, and above all us human resourcefulness and human diversity. they reduce human beings to helpless stick figures, we are not. they also abstract away from military strategy and the reality that no military attack against humanity on the scale doomers imagine would ever go perfectly on the first time, which means humans would launch mighty counterattacks and literal doomers just cloud thinking about the many serious - but not literally existential - threats that we do face.