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There's a germ of insight here that could use some development and nuancing. > The future is uncertain. You cannot predict it. But you can create it. For mill

There's a germ of insight here that could use some development and nuancing. > The future is uncertain. You cannot predict it. But you can create it. For millions of years, prediction has been the engine by which humans have created the future. We don't always call it that, but prediction is the engine. Let's start from the most basic facts of life. We know from experience (our own and others') what plants will sustain us and what will kill us, so we can predict what present-day choices of food will create a positive future. We create our positive future by making choices in accordance with those predictions. It seems that we need to figure out what separates the kind of prediction that is the engine of human life and progress from the kind that is just useless blather.

CharlesW 3y ago
Also to your point, it makes no sense to say, "You cannot predict it. But you can create it." The reason a person or entity creates something is that they've predicted a desired outcome for that creation. > It seems that we need to figure out what separates the kind of prediction that is the engine of human life and progress from the kind that is just useless blather. For sure. The author treats content marketing by management consultancies — blather — as serious efforts to predict outcomes. But these are stories about potential outcomes created to lure customers to the rim of their sales funnel. In other words, their actual prediction is that publishing thousands of "thought leadership" pieces will improve SEO and sales engagement, which is probably true.
cheschire 3y ago
Really? I think rather than prediction as our future creating engine, it's been critical thinking and problem solving. Most inventions are solutions to problems, not solutions in search of problems. Industrialization was in response to a need to scale up production. The internet was in response to a discoverability problem. Smartphones were in response to a need to do personal computing on the go. Monetizing those things was the inflection point for success in all those cases, but even prior to monetization most human ingenuity has been based in problem solving. Which is looking backwards. Not forwards.
- civilized 3y ago
  How do critical thinking and problem solving work? How do we evaluate potential courses of action, if not by predicting their consequences? I showed how prediction is involved in a basic example from everyday life. Do you dispute that?
kromem 3y ago
While true, it's quite an underappreciated factor and rarely considered seriously by people. You are correct that the human ability to manifest our imagination is remarkable. We dream of flying like a bird, eventually we build machines to do it, and then it's taken for granted as part of our society. In the 2nd century Lucian thinks up impossible things, comes up with a ship of men flying up to the moon, and less than two millennia later the impossible is increasingly old history. Often, our invention even outpaces imagination. I can remember watching GATTACA long before watching its primary plot point become obsolete with CRISPR. But despite a longstanding trend of imagination and prediction preceding invention, I regularly see those things dismissed as fantasy when they haven't happened yet. Much like the op-ed saying humans wouldn't fly with a million more years of effort just a year shy of the Wright brothers, I often see a disbelief in human advancement over the status quo as the more predominant perspective that the opposite, especially as the imagined thing is more fantastical. So as an example, I've been talking privately a lot since GPT-3 about how digital resurrection is going to be an increasing trend to the point nearly everyone alive and online today will have a digital twin that outlives them. But because it's considered weird and "Black Mirror" in the present it's often dismissed as fantasy, even though the foundational concept of resurrection is at least as old as the Sumerians and there's already a patent granted to a trillion dollar company for an early technical vision of it. The Wright brothers' plane wasn't going to change the world as it existed that year, but the improvements over the future did. It's seeing the trend of incremental improvements to early versions of a thing that I think people struggle with, and moreso now than a generation before as we've become so conditioned to shorter windows of consideration. "AI can't do my taxes only three years after allegedly doing impossible things that alarmed the most cited scientists? It must be a fad like crypto." Long term vision of sufficiently advanced technology looks more and more like magic, and we're used to dismissing magic as fantasy. So when the things we imagined or predicted in fantasy begin to take shape with emerging technology, we ignore the past trends of realizing fantasy with technology and overemphasize the present state and limitations in predicting the future of it.

CharlesW 3y ago

Also to your point, it makes no sense to say, "You cannot predict it. But you can create it." The reason a person or entity creates something is that they've predicted a desired outcome for that creation. > It seems that we need to figure out what separates the kind of prediction that is the engine of human life and progress from the kind that is just useless blather. For sure. The author treats content marketing by management consultancies — blather — as serious efforts to predict outcomes. But these are stories about potential outcomes created to lure customers to the rim of their sales funnel. In other words, their actual prediction is that publishing thousands of "thought leadership" pieces will improve SEO and sales engagement, which is probably true.

cheschire 3y ago

Really? I think rather than prediction as our future creating engine, it's been critical thinking and problem solving. Most inventions are solutions to problems, not solutions in search of problems. Industrialization was in response to a need to scale up production. The internet was in response to a discoverability problem. Smartphones were in response to a need to do personal computing on the go. Monetizing those things was the inflection point for success in all those cases, but even prior to monetization most human ingenuity has been based in problem solving. Which is looking backwards. Not forwards.

civilized 3y ago
How do critical thinking and problem solving work? How do we evaluate potential courses of action, if not by predicting their consequences? I showed how prediction is involved in a basic example from everyday life. Do you dispute that?

kromem 3y ago

While true, it's quite an underappreciated factor and rarely considered seriously by people. You are correct that the human ability to manifest our imagination is remarkable. We dream of flying like a bird, eventually we build machines to do it, and then it's taken for granted as part of our society. In the 2nd century Lucian thinks up impossible things, comes up with a ship of men flying up to the moon, and less than two millennia later the impossible is increasingly old history. Often, our invention even outpaces imagination. I can remember watching GATTACA long before watching its primary plot point become obsolete with CRISPR. But despite a longstanding trend of imagination and prediction preceding invention, I regularly see those things dismissed as fantasy when they haven't happened yet. Much like the op-ed saying humans wouldn't fly with a million more years of effort just a year shy of the Wright brothers, I often see a disbelief in human advancement over the status quo as the more predominant perspective that the opposite, especially as the imagined thing is more fantastical. So as an example, I've been talking privately a lot since GPT-3 about how digital resurrection is going to be an increasing trend to the point nearly everyone alive and online today will have a digital twin that outlives them. But because it's considered weird and "Black Mirror" in the present it's often dismissed as fantasy, even though the foundational concept of resurrection is at least as old as the Sumerians and there's already a patent granted to a trillion dollar company for an early technical vision of it. The Wright brothers' plane wasn't going to change the world as it existed that year, but the improvements over the future did. It's seeing the trend of incremental improvements to early versions of a thing that I think people struggle with, and moreso now than a generation before as we've become so conditioned to shorter windows of consideration. "AI can't do my taxes only three years after allegedly doing impossible things that alarmed the most cited scientists? It must be a fad like crypto." Long term vision of sufficiently advanced technology looks more and more like magic, and we're used to dismissing magic as fantasy. So when the things we imagined or predicted in fantasy begin to take shape with emerging technology, we ignore the past trends of realizing fantasy with technology and overemphasize the present state and limitations in predicting the future of it.