Hmmm, point taken. I do think this particular case was intended to serve, and does serve, a communicative purpose: If I just said “subsistence living or the extinction of consciousness” then you wouldn’t have keywords to search for, whereas instead by giving these scenarios the names their authors chose, you can easily go read about them. I guess I didn’t think things through enough; after all, it’s annoying to have to go look things up and by name-dropping the scenarios I force you do do that. My apologies!
Hmmm, point taken. I do think this particular case was intended to serve, and does serve, a communicative purpose: If I just said “subsistence living or the extinction of consciousness” then you wouldn’t have keywords to search for, whereas instead by giving these scenarios the names their authors chose, you can easily go read about them. I guess I didn’t think things through enough; after all, it’s annoying to have to go look things up and by name-dropping the scenarios I force you do do that. My apologies!
I appreciated the link to the hardscrapple frontier, which I had not heard of, FWIW.