What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

Re:What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else... by charlieflowers on Sunday March 03, 2013 @01:08AM (#5312734)

I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup that succeeds big.

So it's worth the read to me. Just a little mind-stretcher, but one of the things I come to Hacker News for.

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Re:What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else... by jacques_chester on Sunday March 03, 2013 @03:24AM (#5312974)

Predicting the future is, as the saying goes, hard.

Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly.

Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty.

The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".

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