Short Term Predictions: Accurate or Entertaining?

If you pay any heed to predictions, then your choice is between those extremes: entertaining or accurate. The two seldom mix, because the accurate ones simply predict more of the same, while the entertaining one are correct so seldom that you might as well say that they are never right.

If you want the Second Coming of Jesus, or Klaatu (or whatever his name was) to land on the White House lawn, or whatever amusing things phony seers are predicting to happen, then you will have to make it happen, because that’s the only way that it will, because those events are too far away from the trend.

Trends have inertia. They tend to continue until something comes along to end them, unless a new trend starts. That is how many people make money in investments, jump into the popular thing and sit until either something else comes along or it stops being popular."The trend is your Friend>"

You might claim that that is not predicting the future. But it is. You would be predicting that the trend will continue. There is a second step in the predicting; predicting when the trend will stop. Exactly what would stop a trend depends on what field one is looking at. In investments, changes in interest rates are a biggie, as are changes in laws and government policies and international tensions. But remember what kills one trend usually pumps up another trend. For example, a devastating hurricane would cut real estate prices, but it would tend to increase apartment rents. It would also increase the prices of agricultural crops that were raised in that area, and there probably would be other effects. Or to look at feminine fashion trends, when the gorgeous starlette decides to stop wearing slit skirts, she will have to either wear something else or wear nothing, and either of those could become the new trend.

At least as common as predictions that might be accurate are ones that are silly or amusing. That includes the end of the world; always popular and always inaccurate. Someday someone will get that right, but it won’t happen for another twenty billion years, give or take. The Christians are regularly being treated to predictions of the second coming of Jesus, but those are mostly results of misunderstandings of scriptures. Other religions have similar predictions, but those are mostly based on psychotic delusions, so they aren’t reliable as predictions. But there is a huge potential market in end of the world predictions, if you time it correctly. Decide in advance when you will retire, and plan the prediction for something around the same time. Then make some clever way to frame the predictions, and using the Book of Revelations as your alleged source is the best bet. You will have to build up a following of some size, so take your time. Remember this is a career ending prediction, and you want to have accumulated adequate wealth for the rest of your life.

Another type of entertaining prediction that deserves some attention is the prediction of some cosmic disaster: asteroid collision, errant moon, solar flare, etc. Something like that could happen, and the causes for such events are not apparent, so we can’t accurately predict when they will happen. There are many asteroids with orbits that intersect the Earth’s orbit, so it’s a matter of time until there will be another collision. Of course it is also a matter of the size of the colliding body; the grains of sand are not problems, but the mountain-sized asteroids could make a mess of Mother Earth. Fortunately, the grains of sand are much, much more common. Even something as likely as an asteroid may never happen, if all of the ones with intersecting orbits have already made their marks; that is another matter that present science has not determined.

Another fun thing to make predictions about is some social trend, music, fashion, or similar trend. People are constantly making predictions about what will or will not be popular, and some of the predictions lead to the result predicted. So-and-so says something will become popular, and all of the people who think that Old So-and-so is wonderful jump on the trend and make it a trend. The same effect happens regularly with movies, but there have also been some examples of the public going against the critics’ pronouncements.

Regardless of what you decide to make predictions about, keep your emotions out of it. Do not make predictions because you would like something to happen, unless you do what Jonathan Swift did to a “seer” in the “Bickerstaff Papers”; he predicted that a certain astrologer, Mr. Partridge, would die on March 29, 1708. On March 30, 1708 Swift had bulletins distributed that said that Partridge had died. Swift anonymously wrote a response for Partridge and had that delivered to Partridge, who had that response published. “The Bickerstaff Papers” are worth reading for the joy of reading something by Swift, but he made some very wise statements about predictions.

For my own part, I avoid making predictions that I cannot make happen.

On Predicting the Future

I am not sure whether the universe is deterministic, but it seems to be mostly determined by cause and effect, and I have never seen anything that did not appear to have a cause. If everything does have a cause, and we can determine all of the causes that are having effects on a time and place, then it should be possible to predict what will happen. In theory it is quite simple, but in practice it isn’t quite so easy.

I have read a fair amount of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that tried to predict the future. I have also written some of my own imaginings of the future. While I can’t be sure about some of the more recent material, the old literature has been proven to be quite wrong. Now and then there is a detail that came out right, but the main points are all wrong. I will give H. G. Wells credit for trying so hard, and he got a few things right, but he was pushing a socialist, anti-business idea that I partly agree with, but he didn’t consider how things had gone in the past. Nor did he consider the possibility that the extant trends would change.

Karl Marx made similar mistakes in Das Kapital. It appears that he assumed that the trends that he was looking at would continue unchanged without the imposition of his ideas.

SPECIFIC PREDICTION

Prediction mathematical series: This is a place where prediction is possible over a short span. It isn’t reliable for a long time, but projections of stock averages from the complied data are possible, but when one takes the prediction too far the predictions become meaningless. This principle also applies to other kinds of predictions, such as technological developments and social trends.

SOCIAL TRENDS

If one takes a little while to consider the matter, then it is clear that humans have not changed in their basic nature as far back as there are records, and from earlier archeological records suggest that people were the same for a long time before that. So if you want to predict that humans will become completely generous and communitarian, then you almost certainly will be shown wrong by events over whatever time you choose to predict up to a half million years. I’m not saying that humans will never change, but apes are apes, and it doesn’t make much difference what they look like. Altruism is wonderful, but I come first.

We can predict social and political trends next week, and we can develop a reasonable guess of what might happen in a few months or even next year, but going forward twenty years all we can say with any confidence is that humans will still be humans. How they will act in reaction to specific situations is unknowable, and some of what we regard as essential now was considered unthinkable at some time or place in the past.

TECH

Technology is somewhat less perplexing, but barely more predictable. In Heinlein’s 1952 predictions there are a couple of real laughs: “A thousand miles an hour at $0.01 per mile will be commonplace” gave me a laugh, and it should have produced a laugh in 1952. “The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists.” This is a good joke now, and reactions will vary over time. Trying to predict the future of any fine art is entertaining, but he was completely right on “Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.”  

If you are going to try to predict the future, then look first at the past. Imagine yourself living in your country two hundred years ago or three hundred years ago. Then imagine yourself being transported two or three hundred years into the future to the present time. How much trouble would you have with understanding what was going on? Then take that thought experiment further by imagining yourself an equal distance in the future.  (And keep in mind whether you are trying to make a point about the present or you want to actually figure out what will happening the future.)

As an example, let us imagine what the typical lifespan of humans a thousand years from now. Just looking at trends in medical arts, we can be confident that some humans will have lifespans of several hundred years, but that will not be common to all people, because some people will be kept alive who will lack basic health, and they may have spread their genes, thus harming the gene pool. It is possible that gene therapy may develop to the point that a defective gene will be replaced in every cell, which would get defective genes out of the gene pool entirely, and this would lead to everyone having an extended lifespan. The past trend has been erratic, so using a mathematical trend wouldn’t work, and there are other matters that muddy the waters. For example, there may be a major pandemic that will kill off a large percent of the population, especially those more prone to a variety of diseases. One of the leaders in longevity studies (Aubrey de Grey) has predicted that the first person who will live to the ripe old age of one thousand is alive now. My prediction is based on extrapolation of medical arts, cleaning the gene pool through pandemic, and hope of r the best. I think that the average life expectancy at birth will be about one hundred years, and the life expectancy at age twenty-one will be between two and three hundred. That is a somewhat conservative prediction, and the actual average life expectancy at birth in the year 3013 might be unchanged from what it is at present or lower than that or even higher than my guess.

In a related guess I think that the world population will be somewhat less a thousand years from now in the range of three to five billion. I am hoping for a great pandemic that will get the population down under two billion, but there will be growth after that, Even without the pandemic, I don’t think that the present population is sustainable over the long run. A major disruption in food production would have devastating effects, and there are many possible disruptions.

I have convinced myself that predictions should be avoided, especially when they stretch over a long period. Consider how it is with weather [predictions: accuracy is no better than it was fifty years ago, because there are more variables than can be determined. It is possible to predict the weather for a few days, but weeks away – forget it, and no one would even think about predicting the weather in five hundred years.  

On the Necessity for a New World Order

It probably was a mistake, but I just finished reading “The World Set Free” by H. G. Wells. It is about the nuclear war in the mid 1950’s and the aftermath of the war. The book was written a hundred years ago, before anyone actually knew what a runaway nuclear reaction would be like. He got that wrong, thinking that the chain reaction would continue for years, rather than creating a real explosion of large size. The novel was about the results, rather than the action. He pointed out a few things that we usually forget but that are still important.

Humans are designed to be hunters and gathers. Our social systems and institutions are designed for people who survive by hunting and gathering. While some economic activities are like hunting, there are differences. But the economic system is predicated on human life as it was hundreds or thousands of years ago, and things have changed a little. Social institutions are for a species that numbers in the millions, not the billions. Humans aren’t meant to see other humans in great numbers. The millions of years of evolution led to a species that lived in groups of fewer than three hundred, people who wandered much of the time, animals who perpetuated the works, words, and superstitions of their forebears, people who didn’t change much from millennium to millennium. Until recently things didn’t change much over the millennia, but in the last few thousand years the surroundings in which people found themselves started becoming more and more different over time, and the social situations also changed. As population increased there became more opportunities for exogamy. Until recently the overwhelming majority of people married first or second cousins, and there were people who didn’t look like each other, and some of those strange people were in the habit of doing things that were different from what other people were accustomed. Most social institutions, including governmental institutions are based on the assumption that most people will be similar. It is fairly easy for humans to get along with other humans who seem like them, but humans who are different are potential targets.

As society became different in its constitution, the prior institutions were retained, even though they might not have been ideal. The question is: Do we need a new order? If we do, then what should it be? People have suggested various alterations to social institutions, but those are mostly still based on the same assumptions. I don’t think that the human spirit has changed for thousands of years, and I base that on literature that was written in the past and recently. But that spirit is not appropriate to the situations in which most people live now.

I can see two possibilities. Either humans will change their social institutions, or the human population will decrease dramatically. Both of those possibilities have been explored in non-fiction and in fiction, but I don’t think that anyone has figured out what will actually happen, and I think that the highest probability is for something other than what has been predicted to be the actual result.

I happen to like humans pretty much as they are (at least I am accustomed to them as they are, whether I like them is an individual matter). That doesn’t mean that I am not a misanthrope, but as an observer I think that the human species is interesting, and it is adaptable. Unfortunately, there are a great many humans who are not well suited for humanity as it operates now, and that may include me. I think that the greatest hope for humanity is for its numbers to greatly decrease. In the last one hundred years many people have lived and reproduced who could not have survived without intervention, and humanity has not developed the intellectual strength that is required for a change in the society. Business is still carried on in ways that are largely unchanged. Running a society with the degree of specialization that is required now is different from what was needed just fifty years ago, and the nature of the population has not changed to fill those needs. As technology changes there is more and more need for people with greater intellectual capacity, but humans are still born with an average IQ of 100, which means that half of the population is not even that intelligent. That level of intelligence was fine when most people farmed, fished, mined, or worked in manufacturing plants, but tie often takes more than training for someone to move from physical labor into intellectual labor.

The idea of a population crash has been brought up, and it would be likely, if humans weren’t as aware of their surroundings as they are. It is not unusual for excess population to cause a crash in deer population, squirrel population, and so on, and such a crash in human population is possible, and it would eliminate a great many problems.

Things often work out in ways that were not foreseen. As with the works of H.G. Wells, prediction s become out dated quickly. Looking at history we can see that there usually is one part from one side of the argument, another part from the other side, and yet another part that is different. With that I will make my suggestion.

Regardless of what we might like, there will be a new order of things, but that isn’t on the immediate horizon, and the nature of the changes can’t be determined, but the population of humans will decrease significantly during the next few decades. Lastly, something else will happen, but I don’t know what that will be; although the list is topped with an unexpected scientific breakthrough and contact with intelligent life from another star system.

There are several possibilities of what will cause a decrease in population, but the old standbys top that list: disease and catastrophe. For a catastrophe to be big enough to be effective it would have to be an asteroid strike or something similar. As far as diseases go, Plagues, especially if a new strain evolves, is at the top of the list, but there are many other diseases that could also change only slightly and become world killers.

There are plenty of people who think that society should be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.

Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or Summer), or something else along those lines.

So reader, what do you think?  Must it begin here and now, or can we put things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as we have for these past millions of years?

Grammar, Ignorance, Logic, and the Illuminati

Formal logic was developed from natural language and reasoning, but not all people understand language in the same way, and many people are careless in their use of natural language. For example, there are people who only use the present tense, even though there was a past, and there will be a future.  And there are a few deficiencies in natural language. For example, there is nothing that directly shows whether something is intended as an opinion or as fact, and this can lead to significant problems.

There is nothing in the verbiage, or in the language, that differentiates between fact and fantasy and marketing campaigns. If I were to tell you that Calvados is the healthiest type of alcoholic beverage, then you could either believe me or not, but there is nothing in the statement (or assertion) to show you whether it is true. Determination of truth requires knowledge and understanding on the part of the hearer or reader. Unfortunately, many people do not have the knowledge and logical ability to be able to determine whether a given statement is true, and they often do not understand enough to hold off believing something until they look into the matter.  Even worse, they may look to an unreliable source for validation of facts.

One example of that relates to the old foolishness about cholesterol. We have known for decades that while the plaque that causes coronary blockage is made up of cholesterol, there are mechanisms by which the plaque is deposited, and those mechanisms do not relate to serum cholesterol levels. But there are people who still follow the old, and disproven, idea that the more cholesterol there is in the blood, the higher the chance that a person will have a heart attack.

There are even people who think that eating things that are high in cholesterol will lead to heart failure. In fact, cholesterol is an easily digested, highly nutritious food that should be regarded as a compact source of energy. 

Little matters like correlation not showing causation and unfalsifiable statements not being logically valid are common in marketing, whether one is selling cholesterol lowering medicines or religions. I only used the example above, because it came up in conversation recently. Good marketers love people who have no training in logic. I am sure that they shudder whenever they hear any suggestion that students be trained in logic from the earliest grades. I earlier wrote blogs about the urban myths of a half gallon of water a day and the fallacy of serum cholesterol causing coronary thrombosis, so I won’t go into greater detail.

At least as bad as those are the matters that are claimed by purveyors of conspiracy theories. A few days ago I watched some videos by David Icke, and I was amazed that anyone had the nerve to claim that any of them are evidence of anything other than being strong evidence that Mr. Icke was trying to fool people and not doing a good job, but there are enough who think otherwise that Mr. Icke eats well, and I won’t begrudge a man his living.

With that said, I will assert that the primary reason why conspiracy theories are as successful as they are is that few people learn grammar well, and even fewer learn much logic, and even fewer develop the critical judgment necessary to determine whether something makes sense. All that makes life easy for snake oil merchants and makes elementary school teachers jobs easier than it would be if they had to teach logic.

I don’t see any significant difference among proponents of bogus religions (such as Mormonism and Scientology), creators of conspiracies (such as Mr. Icke and Erich von Däniken), and marketers who spin lies to gain sales (such as whoever ran the bottled water marketing campaign). They are all telling lies for their own good and to the detriment of their audiences. There are many people who will say “It was on TV or on the History Channel,” as if that validates a statement. People can say anything that they want to on TV, and it is legal, and it need not be accurate. The courts have long held that “puffery” in marketing is legal, even if it is not accurate. “The world’s best coffee” probably was made by someone who didn’t even claim that the coffee was the best in town, much less the world, but Dunkin Donuts has filed a trademark on that phrase.  

The link below is to a free, online, textbook in Logic. There are many other free online books, webpages, and courses in logic. Most people, myself included, could use a better knowledge of logic.

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/velleman/blogic/Logic/frameset.html