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I use to ask my father why he bothered using a desktop email client. It seemed like useless overhead, and webmail was the future. Well, webmail is indeed everyw

by gascan 8y ago

I use to ask my father why he bothered using a desktop email client. It seemed like useless overhead, and webmail was the future. Well, webmail is indeed everywhere- but I now use a desktop email client daily. Outsiders don't tend to talk about the predictions they got wrong.

nostrademons 8y ago
Heh, that's very true, but I think that the predictions I've gotten wrong actually tend to err on the side of being too conservative about the future rather than too radical, or of betting on the wrong horse between radical alternatives. I was skeptical of the WWW at first ("Gopher is better organized"), continued to use Eudora and then Outlook right up until GMail came out ("you have to be online to read your e-mail?"), and still don't really get what's so great about Facebook (LiveJournal was better in just about every way, and basically every feature that Google+ forced Facebook into implementing was actually cribbed from LJ a decade before). I think there's a cognitive bias somewhere about people preferring the mental model they already hold over some unknown future. Realistically, pretty much the only thing you can be certain of is that the future will not be the same as today, it's just that picking between many different futures gives you terrible odds of selecting the right one. It seems like your options are assuming that the status quo will continue, which is guaranteed wrong, vs. choosing between multiple competing alternate futures, where you are most likely wrong.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  If you predict the weather tomorrow will be the same as today, you will be right most of the time. It's easy to do worse with a sophisticated model. That's probably a significant reason why evolution leads to humans and other organisms generally not using too much logical analysis, but simply doing what works until it results in a major disaster.
megablast 8y ago
Well, that is because you get a copy of your email on your machine, so don't have to worry about losing the account as much, and you have offline access.

by gascan 8y ago

nostrademons 8y ago

Heh, that's very true, but I think that the predictions I've gotten wrong actually tend to err on the side of being too conservative about the future rather than too radical, or of betting on the wrong horse between radical alternatives. I was skeptical of the WWW at first ("Gopher is better organized"), continued to use Eudora and then Outlook right up until GMail came out ("you have to be online to read your e-mail?"), and still don't really get what's so great about Facebook (LiveJournal was better in just about every way, and basically every feature that Google+ forced Facebook into implementing was actually cribbed from LJ a decade before). I think there's a cognitive bias somewhere about people preferring the mental model they already hold over some unknown future. Realistically, pretty much the only thing you can be certain of is that the future will not be the same as today, it's just that picking between many different futures gives you terrible odds of selecting the right one. It seems like your options are assuming that the status quo will continue, which is guaranteed wrong, vs. choosing between multiple competing alternate futures, where you are most likely wrong.

perl4ever 8y ago
If you predict the weather tomorrow will be the same as today, you will be right most of the time. It's easy to do worse with a sophisticated model. That's probably a significant reason why evolution leads to humans and other organisms generally not using too much logical analysis, but simply doing what works until it results in a major disaster.

megablast 8y ago

Well, that is because you get a copy of your email on your machine, so don't have to worry about losing the account as much, and you have offline access.