Most branches are biased one way or the other. "Fetching down both paths" means not exploiting any information you might have gathered about a branch being bias

Most branches are biased one way or the other. "Fetching down both paths" means not exploiting any information you might have gathered about a branch being biased - I think that would be equivalent to randomly predicting the branch (except for it would cost more than a random predictor because you're actually fetching both ways instead of just one).