When Robin wrote: “It is easy, way too easy, to generate new mechanisms, accounts, theories, and abstractions.” he gets it exactly right (though it is not necessarily so easy to make good ones, that isn’t really the point).
This should have been clear from the sequence on the “timeless universe”—just as that interesting abstraction is not going to convince more than a few credulous fans of the truth of that abstraction, the truth of the magical super-FOOM is not going to convince anybody without more substantial support than an appeal to a very specific way of looking at “things in general”, which few are going to share.
On a historical time frame, we can grant pretty much everything you suppose and still be left with a FOOM that “takes” a century (a mere eyeblink in comparison to everything else in history). If you want to frighten us sufficiently about a FOOM of shorter duration, you’re going to have to get your hands dirtier and move from abstractions to specifics.
When Robin wrote: “It is easy, way too easy, to generate new mechanisms, accounts, theories, and abstractions.” he gets it exactly right (though it is not necessarily so easy to make good ones, that isn’t really the point).
This should have been clear from the sequence on the “timeless universe”—just as that interesting abstraction is not going to convince more than a few credulous fans of the truth of that abstraction, the truth of the magical super-FOOM is not going to convince anybody without more substantial support than an appeal to a very specific way of looking at “things in general”, which few are going to share.
On a historical time frame, we can grant pretty much everything you suppose and still be left with a FOOM that “takes” a century (a mere eyeblink in comparison to everything else in history). If you want to frighten us sufficiently about a FOOM of shorter duration, you’re going to have to get your hands dirtier and move from abstractions to specifics.