Re:Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
by abeppu on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @07:24PM
(#32831412)
> I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback.
No, my assumption is that the author is interested in understanding what contributes to good vs bad predictions, and how credible long range predictions are.
The author points out factors such as whether the predictor appears to learn from past prediction errors, whether they have a deep expertise in the area they're making a prediction about, whether they depend on extrapolating exponential trends etc. I am guessing that "Do they sell a lot of popular press books?" and "Do they receive performance based compensation from an organization invested in the domain under discussion?" are at least as important explanatory factors as the ones the author explicitly discusses.
Nobody needs to be reminded that people who make public predictions might want to deceive investors or customers, to be famous and make money, or to deceive voters or legislators into pursuing their favored policies. People need to be reminded that their current psychics (and pundits for that matter) have a long history of only getting the things right that everybody got right, and even getting a few of those wrong for a bit of contrarian attention.