> I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. No, m

> I think an assumption underlying this comment is that people are grading the accuracy of futurist gurus in order to give those gurus helpful feedback. No, my assumption is that the author is interested in understanding what contributes to good vs bad predictions, and how credible long range predictions are. The author points out factors such as whether the predictor appears to learn from past prediction errors, whether they have a deep expertise in the area they're making a prediction about, whether they depend on extrapolating exponential trends etc. I am guessing that "Do they sell a lot of popular press books?" and "Do they receive performance based compensation from an organization invested in the domain under discussion?" are at least as important explanatory factors as the ones the author explicitly discusses.