Quote of the day 1st September 2022 - Mark Twain demolishes the assumption of infinite extrapolation

 "The Mississippi between Cairo, Illinois and New Orleans, Louisiana, was 1,215 miles long one hundred and 76 years ago. It was 1,180 miles long after the cutoff of 1722. It was 1,040 miles long after the American Bend cutoff. It has lost 67 miles since. Consequently its length is only 973 miles at present.

 Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor 'development of species,' either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague, vague.

 Please observe:

'In the space of 176 years the lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. 

And by the same token, any person can see that 742 years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and 3 quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. 

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Mark Twain, from the book "Life on the Mississippi"

Too many people, including professionals who should know better, still try to predict the future based on the idea that infinite extrapolation is possible, a mode of thought which Mark Twain demolished in the passage above, first published in 1883. 

They make the heroic assumption that because some trend or natural process of change has been observed over a long period of time it will continue forever at more or less the same rate with infinite consequences. This is not always a reliable assumption.  

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