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Futurist prediction methods and accuracy

danluu.com · 34,363 words · saved by 4 readers

I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that are so far out means that only a tiny fraction of people making those kinds of predictions today have a track record so, if we want to evaluate which predictions are plausible, we need to look at something other than track record. The idea behind the approach of this post was to look at predictions from an independently chosen set of predictors (Wikipedia's list of well-known futurists1) whose predictions are old enough to evaluate in order to understand which prediction techniques worked and which ones didn't work, allowing us to then (mostly in a future post) evaluate the plausibility of predictions that use similar methodologies. Unfortunately, every single predictor fro

Futurist prediction methods and accuracy I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that are so far out means that only a tiny fraction of people making those kinds of predictions today have a track record so, if we want to evaluate which predictions are plausible, we need to look at something other than track record. The idea b

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