I don’t really understand what people mean when they talk about the “Amherst bubble”. I never experience the feeling of being taken outside this bubble, of my horizon suddenly broadening, if only for a precious short while. This lack of revelatory experience probably stems either from my never actually leaving the bubble, or from my never being in it in the first place. It’s not clear which—what’s clear is, no “leaving the Amherst bubble” experiences for me.

In contrast, the human-scale-bubble this article bursts is very tangible. When you pause to think of the galaxies stretching out orders of magnitude (in time and space) above you, how not to laugh at the seriousness with which you go about your daily life?

On a less mystical level, I like Hanson’s model very much: a minimal amount of math leading to a somewhat surprising conclusion (”If the probability of completing all the steps within the time window is low, then it turns out that for the cases where all the steps are in fact completed, the average time to complete each “hard” step is unrelated to how hard that step is!”). I’m almost upset to see it side-lined to make space for the substantive argument.