Competency has a tendency to hide in random distributions. The people who were wrong can assert that there is always some portion of people somewhere claiming t

Competency has a tendency to hide in random distributions. The people who were wrong can assert that there is always some portion of people somewhere claiming that something bad is about to happen and that this group -- with people like "Dr. Doom" -- just got lucky. Interestingly, the same group of people usually are the ones crying "but facts are facts" when objecting to pure rhetoric (what other people call a plausible alternative hypothesis that is not easily tested by statistical inference).