WHENEVER the pundits and the experts make a “prediction” they are actually just guessing, like most of us. To be sure, some guesses are better than others, and could be based on data or analysis. But they still involve an element of guesswork. Why? Because we can’t see the future. If we could, life would be way easier — and far different — from what it is now.
It is, for example, easy to “predict” that a declining economy would result in less government revenue. Or that, this year, typhoons would pass by or probably hit the Marianas. But we can’t know when the economy will recover and how, which depends on so many factors, including global ones, over which we have little or no control. As for typhoons, a meteorologist can spot and track them, but no one knows how they could devastate the islands if one makes landfall. How many homes and/or buildings would be damaged or destroyed? Would there be casualties? How many? Soudelor and Yutu both hit Saipan, but they were “not the same” if you ask residents of Chalan Kanoa, San Antonio or Koblerville whose preparations for Yutu, which were based on their experience with Soudelor, went to naught.
In politics, it is also “easy to predict” that certain proposals or policies would be unpopular such as austerity measures, but it’s hard to determine what their political ramifications are even in an election year. (In early 2009, if someone who was not his supporter said that the then-governor would be re-elected amid an economic crisis, and despite his poor health and the scandals involving his administration — that someone would have been called crazy or worse.) Consider, moreover, that political alliances are ever-changing. Allies today could be rivals tomorrow or vice versa. Many voters, too, can change their minds as often as they want. “Scientific” polls are not always 100% accurate.
There is, in short, so much uncertainty in our world. And this is why we like to believe in “predictions,” especially those we agree with. “Wishcasting,” they call it. That doesn’t mean that we’ll get it wrong all the time. Of course not. Many pundits and commentators are into “predictions,” and many can claim to be right most or some of the time. But as a wise person once said, there are only two kinds of predictions: wrong and lucky. Naturally, we tend to remember the times when we’re “right,” but not when we’re wrong. As Dan Gardner noted in his outstanding book, “Future Babble,” the pundits and the experts who make bold predictions “may be wrong far more often than they are right. They may be worse than flipped coins and stopped clocks. But they never fail to deliver the certainty we crave. And we never fail to ask for more.”
In “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” Professor John Allen Paulos said he finds “reading old newspaper analyses, government press releases and bygone bits of punditry both sobering and entertaining. They often seem to presuppose that political and economic matters are, with a little thought and perhaps some calculation, more or less, predictable.” But such matters are not very predictable for mathematical reasons, he added. “These mathematical reasons ensure that much economic and political commentary and forecast are fatuous nonsense, no more on target than the farmer marksman with hundreds of chalked bull’s eyes on the wall of his barn, each with a bullet hole in its center. When asked how he could be so accurate, the farmer…admitted that he first made the shot and then drew the bull’s eye around it.”
According to Paulos, many social forecasts may be paraphrased in one of two ways. The first is: “Things will continue roughly as they have been.” When pressed, the pundit (self-appointed or otherwise) will say: “Until something changes.” In other words, “Things will stay the same until they change, eventually.” Now how can you possibly go “wrong” with that “prediction”?
Human society operates in what Paulos calls a “non-linear dynamical system” with so many variables, known or unknown, that are interconnected and are endlessly interacting, and are sensitive to almost imperceptible changes in their initial conditions. “These changes,” Paulos said, “lead to slightly bigger ones…which lead to yet more substantial deviations, the whole process cascading over time into an aperiodic, nonrepetitive unpredictability.”
For Paulos, “the accuracy of social forecasts and predictions is vastly greater if the predictions are short-term rather than long-term; if they deal with simple rather than complex phenomena, with pairs of closely associated variables rather than many subtly interacting ones; if they’re hazy anticipations rather than precise assertions; and if they are not colored by the participants’ intentions. Note how few political and economic predictions meet the conditions of these ‘ifs’ — those are the ones to take seriously.”
Like this “prediction” that science writer Ronald Bailey once made:
“There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future — and the present — never looked so bleak.”
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