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This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory. It tries to take a purely boolean result of knowing the future, when the real power comes from increa

This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory. It tries to take a purely boolean result of knowing the future, when the real power comes from increasing ones prediction odds ever so slightly. And all it takes is very small increases in ones own odds over the average to benefit heavily relative to blindly marching into the future.

paulcole 7y ago
> This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory This was 100% Chricton's persona for about the last 20 years of his life. Perhaps the most amazing thing was how deeply he was also into some really crazy new age stuff, too. Dictionary definition of don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out.
justinmchase 7y ago
I don't think so... if he was really cranky he wouldn't have called it speculation, which is an extremely generous word for what can easily be interpreted as intentionally manipulative narrative.
- klagermkii 7y ago
  It seems like a pretty broadly defeatist attitude towards current actions having agency over the future: > We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air. > But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody knows the future. > What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows. If his focus was purely towards the charlatans who make predictions and keep getting it wrong with no accountability, I would agree. But he takes it a step further by seemingly emphasizing the futility of the very act of trying to foresee and head off potentially bad situations be it technical, legislative or political.
  - 0x0aff374668 7y ago
    This raises my hackles every time I see it (enough to create an account and post): Y2K was ABSOLUTELY a real problem. There was an enormous amount of money spent prepping for it years before 2000. In 1995, a few years after I graduated from college I got a moonlighting job cleaning databases for a UK phone company, manually editing 2 digit dates to 4 digit dates (I didn't know PERL existed at the time). Yeah, nothing major happened Jan 31 1999, but that's because there was a real, concerted effort to address it that wasn't trumpeted across the news media. Not directed at you, I just needed to yell at a cloud.

paulcole 7y ago

> This veers far too heavily into cranky-old-man territory This was 100% Chricton's persona for about the last 20 years of his life. Perhaps the most amazing thing was how deeply he was also into some really crazy new age stuff, too. Dictionary definition of don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out.

justinmchase 7y ago

I don't think so... if he was really cranky he wouldn't have called it speculation, which is an extremely generous word for what can easily be interpreted as intentionally manipulative narrative.

klagermkii 7y ago
It seems like a pretty broadly defeatist attitude towards current actions having agency over the future: > We need to start remembering that everybody who said that Y2K wasn’t a real problem was either shouted down, or kept off the air. > But my point is, for pending legislation as with everything else, nobody knows the future. > What will be the effect of electing a certain president, or a supreme court justice? Nobody knows. If his focus was purely towards the charlatans who make predictions and keep getting it wrong with no accountability, I would agree. But he takes it a step further by seemingly emphasizing the futility of the very act of trying to foresee and head off potentially bad situations be it technical, legislative or political.
- 0x0aff374668 7y ago
  This raises my hackles every time I see it (enough to create an account and post): Y2K was ABSOLUTELY a real problem. There was an enormous amount of money spent prepping for it years before 2000. In 1995, a few years after I graduated from college I got a moonlighting job cleaning databases for a UK phone company, manually editing 2 digit dates to 4 digit dates (I didn't know PERL existed at the time). Yeah, nothing major happened Jan 31 1999, but that's because there was a real, concerted effort to address it that wasn't trumpeted across the news media. Not directed at you, I just needed to yell at a cloud.