Gott’s Doomsday Argument takes as its fundamental input how long something has already existed as a predictor of how much longer it is likely to exist. It falls down if we know that we are on some special part of the distribution. If for example, we knew how badly the East Bloc economies were doing, we could have come to an explicit understanding of when the Wall would come down. But The Doomsday Argument may be useful when we don’t know how a system works.

Political correctness at universities has lasted already lasted some 30+ years. That means it is a fairly long-lived phenomenon, but nothing indicates it will last a very, very long time. Dr. Kors is resigned to fighting the good fight, but sometimes I wonder whether political correctness isn’t, like the Berlin Wall, like a “knight dying inside his invincible armor”?