One of the issues here is that future-focused discussions often lead to wild speculation because we don’t know the future. Also, there’s often too much confiden

One of the issues here is that future-focused discussions often lead to wild speculation because we don’t know the future. Also, there’s often too much confidence in people’s preferred predictions (skeptical or optimistic) and it would be less heated if we admitted that we don’t know how things will look even a couple of years out, and alternative scenarios are reasonable. So I think you’re right, it’s not enlightening. Criticism of overconfident predictions won’t be enlightening if you already believe that they’re overconfident and the future is uncertain. Conversations might be more interesting if not so focused on bad arguments of the other side. But perhaps such criticism is still useful. How else do you deflate excessive hype or skepticism?