12 ms·

A Few Rules for Predicting the Future (2000)

MichaelZuo 6y ago
It seems that future prediction is a common enough activity that there should be a few rules for predicting the predictions too.
- narag 6y ago
  You can think of life itself as future prediction. Living things predict that certain activities (photosynthesis, feeding) will generate energy so we do that. We predict that we better be here or avoid being there so we can keep predicting instead of being damaged and disappear. So we use that energy to move. And so on.
- Animats 6y ago
  Bill Gates has said that predictions about technology tend to overestimate the near term and underestimate the far term.
  - T-A 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Brave New World (circa 1930) is set in the twenty-sixth century, and despite things having moved a great deal in the direction given by the delta (1920s xor 1900s), the people living in it (although no longer viviparous) are still meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly, just as they were in Marcus Aurelius' second century.
sbelskie 6y ago
I’ve never read Octavia Butler, but the first paragraph has me convinced. I’ll be ordering a few books tonight.
- jf 6y ago
  Her books are well worth reading. Prepare to be delighted, intrigued, and disturbed in equal parts.
  - sbelskie 6y ago
    That’s the trifecta right there. Even more excited now.
- ruined 6y ago
  Parable of the Sower is a nice quick novel, a great place to start, and feels very relevant these days. Lilith's Brood is a lot wilder, a very unique experience.
- abraxas 6y ago
  You’re in for a treat. I personally love Dawn more than any other but you can’t go wrong with her other classics.
- AndrewLiptak 6y ago
  I recently read Parable of the Sower for the first time (wrote about it here: https://andrewliptak.substack.com/p/three-novels-about-unbalanced-worlds https://andrewliptak.substack.com/p/three-novels-about-unbal...) and really was blown away by it.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  She was recently mentioned briefly but strongly positively in the Santa Fe Institute's "Complexity" podcast. This article greatly increases my own interest.
just_steve_h 6y ago
I miss her voice. She was a singular talent. Toshi Reagon created a musical version of The Parable of the Sower that moved me to tears - highly recommended if you can find a video of the performance.
aidenn0 6y ago
> The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. The first of those books was published in 1993. Most of the shit happening right now was already being talked about as a problem then.
- bawolff 6y ago
  That series literally has a facist president takeover using the slogan "Make America Great Again". Its pretty prescient.
  - m463 6y ago
    Or a recipe for takeover. Actually the good part about science fiction is that it can imagine good trajectories too. Elon Musk has mentioned many times that reading science fiction was a formative experience for him.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - acqq 6y ago
    “Though Trump has trademarked it, the slogan did not originate with him, nor even with Butler’s Jarret character—the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign used it, as Matt Taibbi pointed out Rolling Stone last year (1). (Historians have even shown that another of Trump's slogans, "America First," was used by Charles Lindbergh and "Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s."(2)) Again, proto-Trumpism has been in the zeitgeist for a long time. While Butler may have used "Make America Great Again" from her memory of Reagan's first campaign, the way her character employs it speaks to our moment for a number of reasons.” Read more: http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/octavia-butlers-1998-dystopian-novel-features-a-fascistic-presidential-candidate-who-promises-to-make-america-great-again.html http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/octavia-butlers-1998-dyst... ——- 1) Matt Taibbi on the slogan: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trump-is-americas-stupidest-person-has-never-heard-of-google-20150325 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trump-is-am... “Donald Trump Claims Authorship of Legendary Reagan Slogan; Has Never Heard of Google” 2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/14/donald-trumps-new-favorite-slogan-has-a-nazi-friendly-history/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/14/... “Donald Trump’s new favorite slogan was invented for Nazi sympathizers”
dredmorbius 6y ago
How many combinations of unintended consequences and human reactions to them does it take to detour us into a future that seems to defy any obvious trend? Not many. That’s why predicting the future accurately is so difficult. Some of the most mistaken predictions I’ve seen are of the straight-line variety–that’s the kind that ignores the inevitability of unintended consequences, ignores our often less-than-logical reactions to them, and says simply, “In the future, we will have more and more of whatever’s holding our attention right now.” I've been reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) for the first time on this its 50th anniversary, and in assessing its predictions and projections, the ones which seem most accurate typically involve side effects, interactions (often negative), an unintended consequences. Those least accurate come from advocates of a specific technology or product. Butler's advice is excellent.
roenxi 6y ago
> The kids I was talking to were born around 1980, and one of them spoke up to say that she had never worried about nuclear war. A related trick for predicting the future; things that everyone is worried about are likely to get solved. It is the stuff that people dismiss as impossible that is scary, because when it happens everyone is caught out in the same way at the same time. That also leads to a decent heuristic for figuring out if someone is overconfident: listening to see if they can articulate a thoughtful list of things that could go wrong. If they don't have such a list then it is likely they won't have countermeasures in place when something goes wrong and will fail for no good reason. Or worse, they won't pick up on the early signs of failure when there is still time to react and salvage the situation.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams has a rule for that: Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. Scott Adams himself would use this to mock people who are worried about climate change. The problem with this is that if you don’t worry about it, actually it doesn’t get solved. For example everyone was worried about the Y2K bug and nothing happened because enough people in the right position got worried enough, invested in the fix and nothing happened. So it’s a paradox. It’s also a common sense: If you prepare for something, you can prevent it, and if it materialises the damage inflicted would be minimised and if you were not worried about it, disaster happens. Actually, the pandemic is an example of not worrying enough. A lot of people couldn’t got worried until corridors of hospitals become morgues. Months of news and footage were not enough to convince people to worry enough to wear a mask.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    I wouldn't say that categorically: In california based on china's experience we set up huge triage centers in school gymnasia that never got used.
    - mewpmewp2 6y ago
      Imagine a coin flip for a disaster to happen. You could spend large amount of resources to prevent 10x the damage if it occurs. Would you not? Now imagine the disaster didn't happen, would you consider these to be a waste of resources? Now I am not saying that it wasn't waste of resources. All I am saying is that the argument is flawed that resources are wasted because some disaster did not occur. You could criticise the process that determined the chances of those gyms being needed faulty. But then bring arguments on how the process to determine the risk was flawed. Was the process of trying to determine risk from.another country's experience (china) flawed? If so, how should they have determined the risk?
11001001011010 6y ago
Rule number one: Expect people making the same mistakes as they did in any past. Why? Because men are stupid, ignorant, shortsighted, greedy, arrogant, etc.. etc.. In all our vanity we love to think and dream about ourselves of being capable to change our human nature and the course of humanity, but in reality only very few can because it is unimaginable hard. Almost all religions point to this.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Many things were unimaginably hard in the past, until we figured out how to do them. Is it impossible that this may also be the case, to some noteworthy degree, with the human shortcomings you have accurately identified? Some people think that the abstract idea of the ego (or more generally, the illusory nature of human consciousness) plays a very big role in the pattern of follies that mankind seems to repeat across generations and cultures. Consider an idea: if you are engaged in an undertaking (say, designing a somewhat sophisticated machine) where decisions are based on measurements, and your measurements often happen to be incorrect (sometimes incredibly incorrect, to the point of being the opposite of what is true), should one be surprised when the outcome is often other than predicted? And if for some reason the idea never occurs to you that such a flaw exists in the system, or you realize there is a flaw but incorrectly consider it to be unimportant, should one be surprised that problems persists over time?

It seems that future prediction is a common enough activity that there should be a few rules for predicting the predictions too.

narag 6y ago
You can think of life itself as future prediction. Living things predict that certain activities (photosynthesis, feeding) will generate energy so we do that. We predict that we better be here or avoid being there so we can keep predicting instead of being damaged and disappear. So we use that energy to move. And so on.
Animats 6y ago
Bill Gates has said that predictions about technology tend to overestimate the near term and underestimate the far term.
- T-A 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara#Amara's_law
082349872349872 6y ago
Brave New World (circa 1930) is set in the twenty-sixth century, and despite things having moved a great deal in the direction given by the delta (1920s xor 1900s), the people living in it (although no longer viviparous) are still meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly, just as they were in Marcus Aurelius' second century.

sbelskie 6y ago

I’ve never read Octavia Butler, but the first paragraph has me convinced. I’ll be ordering a few books tonight.

jf 6y ago
Her books are well worth reading. Prepare to be delighted, intrigued, and disturbed in equal parts.
- sbelskie 6y ago
  That’s the trifecta right there. Even more excited now.
ruined 6y ago
Parable of the Sower is a nice quick novel, a great place to start, and feels very relevant these days. Lilith's Brood is a lot wilder, a very unique experience.
abraxas 6y ago
You’re in for a treat. I personally love Dawn more than any other but you can’t go wrong with her other classics.
AndrewLiptak 6y ago
I recently read Parable of the Sower for the first time (wrote about it here: https://andrewliptak.substack.com/p/three-novels-about-unbalanced-worlds https://andrewliptak.substack.com/p/three-novels-about-unbal...) and really was blown away by it.
dredmorbius 6y ago
She was recently mentioned briefly but strongly positively in the Santa Fe Institute's "Complexity" podcast. This article greatly increases my own interest.

just_steve_h 6y ago

I miss her voice. She was a singular talent. Toshi Reagon created a musical version of The Parable of the Sower that moved me to tears - highly recommended if you can find a video of the performance.

aidenn0 6y ago

> The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. The first of those books was published in 1993. Most of the shit happening right now was already being talked about as a problem then.

bawolff 6y ago
That series literally has a facist president takeover using the slogan "Make America Great Again". Its pretty prescient.
- m463 6y ago
  Or a recipe for takeover. Actually the good part about science fiction is that it can imagine good trajectories too. Elon Musk has mentioned many times that reading science fiction was a formative experience for him.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- acqq 6y ago
  “Though Trump has trademarked it, the slogan did not originate with him, nor even with Butler’s Jarret character—the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign used it, as Matt Taibbi pointed out Rolling Stone last year (1). (Historians have even shown that another of Trump's slogans, "America First," was used by Charles Lindbergh and "Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s."(2)) Again, proto-Trumpism has been in the zeitgeist for a long time. While Butler may have used "Make America Great Again" from her memory of Reagan's first campaign, the way her character employs it speaks to our moment for a number of reasons.” Read more: http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/octavia-butlers-1998-dystopian-novel-features-a-fascistic-presidential-candidate-who-promises-to-make-america-great-again.html http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/octavia-butlers-1998-dyst... ——- 1) Matt Taibbi on the slogan: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trump-is-americas-stupidest-person-has-never-heard-of-google-20150325 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/donald-trump-is-am... “Donald Trump Claims Authorship of Legendary Reagan Slogan; Has Never Heard of Google” 2) https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/14/donald-trumps-new-favorite-slogan-has-a-nazi-friendly-history/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/14/... “Donald Trump’s new favorite slogan was invented for Nazi sympathizers”

dredmorbius 6y ago

How many combinations of unintended consequences and human reactions to them does it take to detour us into a future that seems to defy any obvious trend? Not many. That’s why predicting the future accurately is so difficult. Some of the most mistaken predictions I’ve seen are of the straight-line variety–that’s the kind that ignores the inevitability of unintended consequences, ignores our often less-than-logical reactions to them, and says simply, “In the future, we will have more and more of whatever’s holding our attention right now.” I've been reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) for the first time on this its 50th anniversary, and in assessing its predictions and projections, the ones which seem most accurate typically involve side effects, interactions (often negative), an unintended consequences. Those least accurate come from advocates of a specific technology or product. Butler's advice is excellent.

roenxi 6y ago

> The kids I was talking to were born around 1980, and one of them spoke up to say that she had never worried about nuclear war. A related trick for predicting the future; things that everyone is worried about are likely to get solved. It is the stuff that people dismiss as impossible that is scary, because when it happens everyone is caught out in the same way at the same time. That also leads to a decent heuristic for figuring out if someone is overconfident: listening to see if they can articulate a thoughtful list of things that could go wrong. If they don't have such a list then it is likely they won't have countermeasures in place when something goes wrong and will fail for no good reason. Or worse, they won't pick up on the early signs of failure when there is still time to react and salvage the situation.

mrtksn 6y ago
Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams has a rule for that: Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. Scott Adams himself would use this to mock people who are worried about climate change. The problem with this is that if you don’t worry about it, actually it doesn’t get solved. For example everyone was worried about the Y2K bug and nothing happened because enough people in the right position got worried enough, invested in the fix and nothing happened. So it’s a paradox. It’s also a common sense: If you prepare for something, you can prevent it, and if it materialises the damage inflicted would be minimised and if you were not worried about it, disaster happens. Actually, the pandemic is an example of not worrying enough. A lot of people couldn’t got worried until corridors of hospitals become morgues. Months of news and footage were not enough to convince people to worry enough to wear a mask.
- dnautics 6y ago
  I wouldn't say that categorically: In california based on china's experience we set up huge triage centers in school gymnasia that never got used.
  - mewpmewp2 6y ago
    Imagine a coin flip for a disaster to happen. You could spend large amount of resources to prevent 10x the damage if it occurs. Would you not? Now imagine the disaster didn't happen, would you consider these to be a waste of resources? Now I am not saying that it wasn't waste of resources. All I am saying is that the argument is flawed that resources are wasted because some disaster did not occur. You could criticise the process that determined the chances of those gyms being needed faulty. But then bring arguments on how the process to determine the risk was flawed. Was the process of trying to determine risk from.another country's experience (china) flawed? If so, how should they have determined the risk?

11001001011010 6y ago

Rule number one: Expect people making the same mistakes as they did in any past. Why? Because men are stupid, ignorant, shortsighted, greedy, arrogant, etc.. etc.. In all our vanity we love to think and dream about ourselves of being capable to change our human nature and the course of humanity, but in reality only very few can because it is unimaginable hard. Almost all religions point to this.

mistermann 6y ago
Many things were unimaginably hard in the past, until we figured out how to do them. Is it impossible that this may also be the case, to some noteworthy degree, with the human shortcomings you have accurately identified? Some people think that the abstract idea of the ego (or more generally, the illusory nature of human consciousness) plays a very big role in the pattern of follies that mankind seems to repeat across generations and cultures. Consider an idea: if you are engaged in an undertaking (say, designing a somewhat sophisticated machine) where decisions are based on measurements, and your measurements often happen to be incorrect (sometimes incredibly incorrect, to the point of being the opposite of what is true), should one be surprised when the outcome is often other than predicted? And if for some reason the idea never occurs to you that such a flaw exists in the system, or you realize there is a flaw but incorrectly consider it to be unimportant, should one be surprised that problems persists over time?