Worse in some ways, but epistemology has always been difficult, and true skill at it rare to encounter - Mencken, if I recall, was often trenchant on that topic

Worse in some ways, but epistemology has always been difficult, and true skill at it rare to encounter - Mencken, if I recall, was often trenchant on that topic, and even his were recent entries in a theme evergreen through all our history. What I think is at least as likely, especially if this week just past turns out more prefiguration than outlier, is for the Internet, and thus these days of course the world, to get a lot weirder. That's not necessarily a bad thing, or at least not necessarily only, but it's all the more trepidatory a prospect for the deep and pervasive uncertainty with which it's yet attended. We don't have any way to know, or even really guess, what the world gets like after it becomes not just possible but common for humans to have intercourse [1] with entities which are recognizably intelligent in a similar fashion to ourselves, and are also ineluctably unhuman. But after the week we've just had, I think there exists a reasonable chance that before very long we will all be embarked upon the project of finding out. [1] The word also means "conversation", and that's the sense I have in mind. If you think that's where it'll end, you may not be all that familiar with today's Internet, after all.