One would think that people who made accurate long-range predictions would be more listened-to than those whose predictions were wrong. Yet being-listened to is more a product of knowing what buttons to push now, sensing what the public is interested in this week. That may or may not coincide with the ability to make predictions. I have run various crossing-point years in my own life through google (graduation years, marriage, first child, second child - it got fuzzier after that) and just walked around thinking about my results. I have wondered this week if there actually may be a negative correlation, as the people who really like making public predictions keep themselves in the public eye with entertainment value, while some of the accurate predictors were just guys doing their job, no longer noticed.
The Threarah in Watership Down was right (though wrong about the Black Swan event that overcame his warren) - sometimes the prophets have even larger audiences after their predictions fail.
3 comments:
James didn't enjoy "Courtship Rite"--a great disappointment to me!--but that was a science fiction novel one of whose themes was a political structure in which one achieved power by making the most accurate predictions. We already have a system in which the ability to make accurate predictions about the market is a path to riches.
Sorry :-) Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Given the number of factors in play in even a simple contest, even predictions a year down the road are dicey. It's not very likely that your competitor will die of a heart attack, or that a Korean firm will go bust and take down a critical supplier, or that somebody in Tel Aviv will come up with a better process, but the chance of all these sorts of things NOT happening can get kind of small. (1-\epsilon)^N ...
I have a half-entertained metaphysical theory that acts as a kind of opposing theory to the collapse of super-positions from observation. I theorize that the one thing that the future cannot be is whatever anyone expects it to be. It must be, in at least some small way, something no observer has imagined.
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