Week 5 & 6 combined—successful predictions and my forecast of predictions.
Successful Predictions win prizes?
Actually yes, in some cases the successful predictionist will win the Nobel prize for a correct prediction in economics or science…
Such as Robert Engle and Clive Granger ‘s 2003 Nobel prize in economics based upon their path-breaking discovery of a method for analyzing unpredictable movements in financial market prices and interest rates. Accurate characterization and prediction of these volatile movements are essential for quantifying and effectively managing risk. For example, risk measurement plays a key role in pricing options and financial derivatives. Previous researchers had either assumed constant volatility or had used simple devices to approximate it. They developed new statistical models of volatility that captured the tendency of stock prices and other financial variables to move between high volatility and low volatility periods (“Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity: ARCH”). These statistical models have become essential tools of modern asset pricing theory and practice.
Successful Predictions Part 1: Overview
There have been numerous, various famous and infamous predictions made throughout history, including those by scientists, sociologists, technologists, futurologists, economists, philosophers, prophets, and even the fictional predictions of science fiction.
Predictions can be further categorized as good or bad, successful or failed.
For some, the jury is still out, such as those of the
Malthusian camp…
I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
– Malthus 1798
Malthus’s prophets of doom regarding sustainability and overpopulation and the Cornucopian and Utopian futures of abundance and perfection are the two major views on such “powers”.
Conversely, a cornucopian is someone who believes that continued progress and provision of material items for mankind can be met by advances in technology. Fundamentally there is enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide plenty for the estimated peak population of about 9 billion in 2050.
However, this must also mean that there is enough for the current world population but starvation and fuel poverty have not been eradicated, suggesting that the problem is not a lack of resources but the distribution of said resources by the current economic and political system. Looking further into the future the abundance of matter, energy and lebensraum in space would appear to give humanity almost unlimited room for growth.
The term comes from the cornucopia, the mythical "horn of plenty" of the Greek mythology which supplied its owners with endless food and drink magically. The cornucopians are sometimes known as "Boomsters", and their philosophic opponents --- Malthus and his school --- are called "Doomsters."
I don’t know about you, but every time I hear the predictions that seem to come every few years regarding the sustainability of human life, overpopulation, and our non-renewable resources and how we’re headed for catastrophe, my mind immediately conjures up one of my favorite movies growing up -- “
Soylent Green”.
It’s not really that I’m morbid or anything, but the things I liked about that movie were that
- – Charlton Hesston was such a ‘cool’ cop character (Detective Robert Thorn) in that flick. (The character is eerily similar to his character two years previous in “The Omega Man”. But he always was a tough guy with lots of class…)
- – It was Edward G. Robinson’s last movie—he died 9 days after filming. (I tried to find a sound clip of his character “Sol the Book” talking about how they used to eat real food [back in the day] after Thorn brought home strawberries and beef from the crime scene, but I could only find clips of Hesston)
- – And the idea of the “renewable” food supply did seem kind of ingeniously logical in a strange way… (but in my defense, I was only a teenager then too!)
Often, the difference between pessimistic and optimistic prediction depends on attitudes such as technophilia, technophobia, and political / social bias. Some of these attributes plague technology still today and the result of this bias determines in many cases success or failure of new products and services—the key (as they say in comedy) is timing. If the public believes the “magic” (see my post of
fodder for the foolish for the magic test) of new technology it is embraced and adopted, when the magic is not believable for whatever reason or attitude, the idea is shunned and failure is declared.
Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his three laws of prediction (Profiles of the Future, 1961 ). British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously argued that to understand the future it was necessary to understand the past. Patrick Henry once said, "I have but one lamp to guide my life. I only know the future from the past."
Nostradamus is perhaps the world's most famous author of prophecies (predictions).
A range of quite different views regarding Nostradamus are expressed in printed literature and on the Internet. At one end of the spectrum, there are extreme academic views such as those of Jacques Halbronn, suggesting at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus' Prophecies are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to grind. Although Halbronn possibly knows more about the texts and associated archives than almost anybody else alive (he helped dig out and research many of them), most other specialists in the field reject this view.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous fairly recent popular books, and thousands of private websites, suggesting not only that the Prophecies are genuine but that Nostradamus was a true prophet. Thanks to the vagaries of interpretation, no two of them agree on exactly what he predicted, whether for our past or for our future.
There is somewhat of a consensus among these works, however, that he predicted the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, both world wars, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also a consensus that he predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of each book's publication, from the Apollo moon landings, through the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, to the events of 9/11: this 'movable feast' aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre.
Possibly the first of these books to become truly popular in English was Henry C Roberts' The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus of 1947, reprinted at least seven times during the next 40 years, which contained both transcriptions and translations, with brief commentaries. This was followed in 1961 by Edgar Leoni's unusually dispassionate Nostradamus and His Prophecies, which is universally regarded as by far the best and most comprehensive treatment and analysis of Nostradamus in English prior to 1990. After that came Erika Cheetham's well-known The Prophecies of Nostradamus, incorporating a reprint of the posthumous 1568 edition, which was reprinted, revised and republished several times from 1973 onwards, latterly as The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus. This went on to serve as the basis for Orson Welles' celebrated film/video The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Apart from a two-part translation of Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus: historien et prophète of 1980, the series could be said to have culminated in John Hogue's well-known books on the seer from about 1994 onwards, including Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1999) and, most recently, Nostradamus: A Life and Myth (2003).
With the exception of Roberts, these books and their many popular imitators were almost unanimous not merely about Nostradamus' powers of prophecy, but also about various aspects of his biography. He had been a descendant of the Israelite tribe of Issachar; he had been educated by his grandfathers, who had both been physicians to the court of Good King René of Provence; he had attended Montpellier University in 1525 to gain his first degree: after returning there in 1529 he had successfully taken his medical doctorate; he had gone on to lecture in the Medical Faculty there until his views became too unpopular; he had supported the heliocentric view of the universe; he had travelled to the north-east of France, where he had composed prophecies at the abbey of Orval; in the course of his travels he had performed a variety of prodigies, including identifying a future Pope; he had successfully cured the Plague at Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere; he had engaged in 'scrying' using either a magic mirror or a bowl of water; he had been joined by his secretary Chavigny at Easter 1554; having published the first installment of his Propheties, he had been summoned by Queen Catherine de' Medici to Paris in 1556 to discuss with her his prophecy at quatrain I.35 that her husband King Henri II would be killed in a duel; he had examined the royal children at Blois; he had been buried standing up; and he had been found, when dug up at the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date of his disinterment.
From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in, especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus' private correspondence and, during succeeding years, of the original editions of 1555 and 1557 discovered by Chomarat and Benazra, together with the unearthing of much original archival material revealed that much that was claimed about Nostradamus simply didn't fit the documented facts. The academics pointed out that not one of the claims just listed was backed up by any known contemporary documentary evidence. Most of them had evidently been based on unsourced rumours retailed as 'fact' by much later commentators such as Jaubert (1656), Guynaud (1693) and Bareste (1840), on modern misunderstandings of the 16th-century French texts, or on pure invention. Even the often-advanced suggestion that quatrain I.35 had successfully prophesied King Henri II's death did not actually appear in print for the first time until 1614, 55 years after the event.
On top of that, the academics, who themselves tend to eschew any attempt at 'interpretation', complained that the English translations were usually of poor quality, seemed to display little or no knowledge of 16th-century French, were tendentious and, at worst, were sometimes twisted to fit the events to which they were supposed to refer (or vice versa). None of them, certainly, were based on the original editions: Roberts had based himself on that of 1672, Cheetham and Hogue on the posthumous edition of 1568. Even the relatively respectable Leoni accepted on his page 115 that he had never seen an original edition, and on earlier pages indicated that much of his biographical material was unsourced.
However, none of this research and criticism was originally known to most of the English-language commentators, by function of the dates when they were writing and, to some extent, of the language it was written in. Hogue, admittedly, was in a position to take advantage of it, but it was only in 2003 that he accepted that some of his earlier biographical material had in fact been 'apocryphal'. Meanwhile the scholars were particularly scathing about later attempts by some lesser-known authors (Hewitt, 1994; Ovason, 1997; Ramotti, 1998) to extract 'hidden' meanings from the texts with the aid of anagrams, numerical codes, graphs and other devices.
The bottom line is this: although Nostradamus’s “prophecies” seem to predict either correctly or incorrectly the future, they are generally too vague and ambiguous to be factual with regard to specific events. Seemingly, only those who want to believe they were true predictions have attempted to “prove” them to be successful.
My predictions however are more specific and are located here for posterity:
http://profhinkle.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-latest-predictions-fodder-for.html
1. I feel that Computational grids (including CPU Scavenging grids) which focuses primarily on computationally-intensive operations, or Data grids -- the controlled sharing and management of large amounts of distributed data will come into personal computing usage in the mainstream (not just reserved for large companies anymore).
2. Computers will not replace humans with complex problem-solving skills since humans use logic mixed with illogic (mainly due to their human perspective and experiences) to create success. Note: this one is contrary to the 205 BT technology timeline that predicts “Expert systems surpass average human learning and logic abilities – 2011-2015”
3. Computers will control basic functions such as self-monitoring of simple systems (communication, comfort, entertainment, facilities) and some self-maintenance in homes widespread globally in civilized countries by 2025.
4. People will have more personal computers (in their homes, cars, and clothing) than televisions by 2020. Remember the movie “Back to the Future” when the 50’s family flatly stated that “nobody has two TVs”?
5. A “new” major computer programming language (or perhaps a NanoLanguage) will emerge prior to 2030 that will replace many of the older languages. I expect Ted Vera, Steve Chadwick, Alex Probst, or Michelle Hammonds to be involved in this project somehow…
6. New ways will be invented to harness the power of the human brain using some type of technology or devices (e.g. nanotechnology). In the 2005 BT technology timeline, they refer to this as “Brain add-on’s” and I agree with them, although I believe we will see them prior to (at least one decade sooner than) the forecasted 2030’s date.
Check back often to see what others are saying about these!
