Sure, I do agree that the world, especially the climate system, may veer off into uncharted territory soon. (Maybe it already started.) I'm just saying these particular "predictions" don't seem to contain any useful information. Anyone can say "things can go wrong." Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.

> Hell, I can say that, and I may even be right.

Not only may you be right, you are in fact guaranteed to be right. Of course, predicting exactly when things go wrong is another ballgame altogether.

Edit: the downvotes on HN are becoming so reactionary lately, it feels like it's slowly turning into reddit. Or maybe people just aren't familiar with Poincaré recurrence, etc.?

Perhaps the uncouth voting on HN is a further sign of impending societal collapse.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you are right. I guess it depends on specificity of predictions. In one white paper I called some of the current trends of 2021 ( granted, I personally believed they were relatively apparent, but I did have some arguments over my assumptions ).

This is just the Mayan calendar phenomena. Just because something is old and accurate up until today doesn't meant that it actually predicts the end of the world.

The Mayan calendar also doesn't predict the world would end in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#Maya_reference...

There is just one inscription predicting that a particular god would do something (that's not clearly understood) at that time. Charles Mann suggested that it could be just as plausible to interpret the "investiture" when this god comes to Earth as a kind of party or celebration, and not a cataclysm.