How Good Are You At Predicting the Future?

Behavioral economics, decisions, entertainment, future, humor, movies, musings, origin, quotes, risk, society, stories, video 2 Minutes

When discussing The Devil You Don’t Know, Gallivance reminded us of a blast from the past in corporate life: predictions of future. There is a hunger in the corporate world for what will be the top trends, predictions, and forecasts the future. For next year. For 5 years out. For 10 years out. I was fascinated by these predictions the first time I came across them. I was intrigued by them the second time I was exposed to them. It was probably around the third time that I learned the quote to the right 😀

So allow me to cherry pick some well known past predictions that reinforce the quote:

“The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad.” (Banker in 1903)

This piece of advice was given by a leading banker to Horace Rackham, a lawyer who worked for Henry Ford in 1903, and helped incorporate the then new company. Fortunately for the Horace Rackham, he sought out additional advice from another source. This additional advice that convinced Rackham to invest the $5,000 he had the opportunity to invest in the new, then, car company. Rackham eventually sold his investment for $12,500,000, which is a lot of money even today… Can you imagine how much it was worth then?

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” (President of Warner Brothers, 1927)

According to his brother, this was said by Harry Warner, the president of Warner Brothers Pictures in 1927, about, well, having actors speak in movies. Can you imagine not having delightful scenes like the one in When Harry Met Sally where the punch line was written Billy Crystal? The scene is to the right. Definitely worth the 3ish minutes for the entire scene, though the embedded clip is set to start a minute into it.

“Not even their mothers would claim they sing well.” (LA Times in 1964)

This was part of a longer opinion about The Beatles that was published in 1964 in the Los Angeles Times. That same link has quite a few other amusing (in retrospect, of course) critics of the Beatles from a variety of newspapers in 1964 which include “If you don’t think about them, they will go away, and in a few more years they will probably be bald…”

What do you think? Any accurate predictions you’ve made or come across? How about somewhat less accurate predictions that you’ve made or come across? Do SHARE!

Published by Endless Weekend

This is the story of our Endless Weekend. For a combined five-ish decades we dealt with the usual high tech rat race: alarms, cubicles/hobbit holes, TPS reports, productivity indicators/red lab coats. It was a good run (though Dilbert is more accurate than not), but it was all … Work Days, Week Days vs. Week Ends. No more Week Days. In the summer of 2019, we, husband and wife in our 40s, decided to embark on an Endless Weekend (read: early retirement). Come share our journey, it starts here.

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78 thoughts on “How Good Are You At Predicting the Future?”

  1. My boyfriend is a brilliant long-term thinker and seems to always been 10 years ahead of the curve. He dissuaded me from genetic testing after reading the terms of service and revealing that, based on the wording, they would own the DNA data and retain the records forever (putting the data at risk of theft of being sold into the wrong hands). With the introduction of self-driving cars, he predicted they would have bio-metric readers and the car would lock and drive the perpetrator within straight to the police station (I just read an article that when payments are delinquent, Ford self-driving cars will drive themselves back to the dealership). His current predictions are that plasmalogens and peptides are the future of medicine and that the inventor of plasmalogen precursor supplements, Dr. Dayan Goodenowe, will win a Nobel Prize 10-15 years from now. My brain doesn’t so predictions, haha!!

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    1. Whoa! Is he a writer for Black Mirror? There was once an episode where the self-driving car “decided” that the driver needed to reach another destination, not the one the driver was looking for, locked the driver in the car, and “took over.” Sort of like the 2001 Space Odyssey “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”…

      They had a spectacular episode about a society where everyone pretty much rates every interaction they have with others (not only online, irl, too) on a scale of 1–5, and that determines, well, everything. There are neighborhoods you can only live in with a certain “rating” (say, 4.5 or above), cars you can get with a certain rating… Ratings become everything. The unintended consequences…

      I’ve not heard of this inventor, but I know that dementia is one of the worst diseases imaginable: it robs one of itself. If only we found a way to ensure we never get it…

      So what is it like to live with someone who makes such fantastic predictions? What an amazing way for a mind to work! Does he leverage this incredible skill at his work, too?

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          1. I think there are quite a few episodes I’ve missed as I look back thanks to Google. Or perhaps the ones that don’t seem familiar just didn’t impress me. I clearly remember Season 1 and National Anthem, although I only saw that a few years ago, not in 2011. Ashley Too sticks in my brain as well as most from this latest season. It’s pretty interesting that so many of the middle years seasons were big on AI related story lines… fits the predictions theories really well!

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          2. Yet again, my memory fails me, I’ll have to watch them again! Yes, the AI story lines have been popular for a while, Space Odyssey 2001, Terminator’s Skynet, and have you seen the tv show NeXt? A very well done story, no?

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      2. Maybe I need to send him to write for Black Mirror! He was a animator at Nintendo but developed a hand tremor after a brain injury and is now in medical school, and in his teens he was one of the top CompUSA computer salesman in the state 😆😆 …he’s quite the Renaissance man!

        Oh, I love hos his mind works! He expands my understanding of the world and imagination about what the future could be like. It’s fun and exciting and while he doesn’t currently leverage the skill in anyway, I suspect he’ll be all over the cutting-edge medicine options when he’s in practice… decades ahead of the mainstream doctors, surely.

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        1. I heard wonderful things about Nintendo! Like that the founder of the company said that he doesn’t believe people can work productively when they’re constant under the threats of cost-cuts and losing their jobs for those reasons, which is why he never had those type of workforce cuts!

          What a splendid descriptor to give to a person, I love it “Renaissance Man”! Wow!!!

          I’m curious: what does he say about the ancient “let food be your medicine”?

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          1. It sounds like it was demanding but rewarding and the company was filled with incredible talent, at least back in the (I think) early 2000s.

            Interesting question about food as medicine. I would say he’s 50-50 on the topic. We eat locally grown, in season, organic foods and try to rely on nature… but supplement nutrients because the soil is so depleted and our environment so toxic (pollution, plastics, chemicals). So, I would say he believes food is medicine, but also acknowledges food may not be enough in our modern world.

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  2. When I was 14 my mother wanted me to retake typing 101 b/c I barely passed it. She said when I grow up everyone will be typing. I scoffed and rolled my eyes. I regret not retaking it because everyone is typing on cell phones and keyboards. I leave out words all the time because my fingers just aren’t fast enough! Mom is always right and can see into the future! 😂

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    1. Your mother must have been amazingly wise! Do you remember any other predictions she has made? It’s spectacular how she could have foreseen this. I recently reread Asimov’s The Foundation and as wondrous as his stories are, computers really don’t come into play but nuclear-operated devices do?

      I had to smile warmly as I was reading your story, and not only because mothers everywhere must feel 2” taller that all the times they urged us to take a jacket would make sense to us one day! I miss my mom’s advice…

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        1. It’s funny, the things that stick with us…

          And also, as I was thinking of snappy comebacks, of course, a few decades too late, we shouldn’t forget secretaries like the Secretary of State 😁

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      2. 🙃 Remember Sliding Doors? Who knows where taking that typing class might have landed you? Maybe it would have been the door to secretarial-dom… A different life. Maybe typing with three fingers (now I’m curious, what’s the third finger you use? 🤓) is for the best?

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        1. I was determined not to become a secretary so the skill probably would have laid dormant until PCs were invented. As I am writing this, I am paying attention to which fingers I’m using: index and middle finger on my left hand, middle finger on my right. I’m actually pretty fast and accurate with those three digits. 🙂

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          1. Usain Bolt, of the many Olympic gold medals fame, who had his own special way of running was once asked why doesn’t he adopt everyone else’s running style, because imagine how fast he would ran then. His answer was that then he’d run just like everyone else. Maybe your way produces the best writing results for you?

            Glad that even at a young age you knew what was right for you! 💪

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  3. I don’t know about predictions per se, but I do get gut feelings or instincts about people sometimes. Also, given my age and therefore my great levels of practical wisdom, I am an expert at telling my adult children how their decisions will likely turn out well into the future. Mostly I am correct in both of those “predictable” areas. I find great self-satisfaction in that 🙂

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    1. Whoa! What I hear you say is a rephrase of Emerson’s “The years teach much which the days never know.” You may say that humorously, but I find a great truth in that. There was this interview with a lady who now worked in the corporate world with what she would have described, if she read your words, as adults with “great levels of practical wisdom”. How did this come about?

      She said that she spent her merry (and she said they were) 20s in a series of failed startups. Each one had a brilliant concept, a bunch of young, talented, fun-to-work-with colleagues, and each failed miserably. In retrospect, she said, these startups would have succeeded if only they had an “adult” with “great levels of practical wisdom” (no, she didn’t know to use these words, but I bet she would have had she read them 🙃). Why? Because as fun, brilliant, and talented as she and her colleagues were, they made simple but detrimental mistakes that had they only known what a person “with great levels of practical wisdom” knows offhand, they wouldn’t have fallen on their faces. And in the corporate world she has access to those folks.

      Your kids may not appreciate the advice now, but maybe one day? And I do … now.

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      1. Wow! I feel honored to be included in a sentence related to RW Emerson!

        There is technical knowledge and their is life wisdom, at least that is how I look at things simplistically. You can have book learned and/or technical skill in a job, but until you have to reason, apply critical thinking, solve issues on the fly…you know all the real world aspects…then I think you really don’t know beans about things. You also have to have the ability to observe others and tune into society and culture for perspective. How can you be a well-rounded, thinking individual if you don’t? Given all that you can generate life and personal wisdom the older you get. Most folks get there at some point, at least I like to think they do, although some will fight to the death to hold onto a narrow scope of knowledge and believe there is nothing else of value to embrace…

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        1. It’s your words echoing in my mind….

          It’s funny you should say that. One of the best managers I ever had introduced me to the t-shape employee model, someone who has depth in one area, but breadth in everything else that matters. He had me at hello. And while he appreciated it, most folks seem to not get it. And it’s a shame. There’s something to be said for the achievements of renaissance people like da Vinci who had depth and breadth both. How can you have truly inspired ideas without both? Yes, foundational depth is essential, but it’s a necessary, not a sufficient aspect of what we need, no? What do you think?

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  4. I enjoyed reading those failed predictions. I was an early user of Mac computers. I wanted my husband to buy Apple stock in the late 1980s. He agreed to, but not the number of shares I wanted. I wanted him to sell our Merrrill Lynch stock (he was an employee) and put it all in Apple. People were saying Apple would be going out of business, but I was a strong supporter because I loved their product. Microsoft stole their “windows” and Apple would have gone defunct except Microsoft gave them money to stay in business. Otherwise Microsoft would have had monopoly issues. At one point, we figured out that we’d have $37 million if we bought the Apple stock.

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        2. Whoa. No. WHOA!!! I remember reading that around the time that Steve Jobs came back to Apple, analysts said that the best thing he could do for the shareholders was to sell all the assets and divide it amongst them… These analysts certainly lacked your foresight (but made up for it with meanness 🤪). Can you imagine???

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  5. This is a very pertinent article. I guess the most recent I can think of deals with computers and email. Everyone figured it to be a fad. So much so that our US Postal Service declined the option to monitor it at 5 cents per email!!

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  6. Thanks for the shout out and link to our blog. When it comes to predicting the future I tread lightly. As a scientist and later a manager, a significant part of my job was predicting the future in some aspect or other. But, there are so many variables that are beyond our control that anyone who boasts of their prognosticating skill is setting themselves up for a fall. Of course, we can’t fail to plan or live in fear of future unknowns, but a realistic idea of how wrong one can be is healthy when it comes to predicting the future. ~James

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    1. Thank YOU for prompting the post!

      I hear you about plans of mice and men. Over time I learned the truth in the old saying (I’m paraphrasing from memory, I’m sure it was said more eloquently) that the most valuable thing about a plan is the act of planning…

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  7. I don’t know that I am clairvoyant enough to make longterm societal predictions, but I am intuitive/observant enough to know when a person right in front of me is most likely lying. Think Poker Face.

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    1. I think that that may be a much more valuable skill to have: how we react to an event has often much more to do with the outcome than the event itself? Being able to spot those early signs of how a person is likely to behave is magic.

      So… do you make oodles playing poker?

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  8. I find it comical when some predictor touts some successful prediction. It seems remarkable until you notice they missed on fifty predictions before nailing one. 😊

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  10. Vincent Van Gogh was discouraged because no one understood his art, but he was consumed with continuing to develop his style. So many paintings, sitting around being ignored. In 1889, one year before his death, he wrote to his brother Theo, “Now I as a painter shall never amount to anything important, I am absolutely sure of it.”

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    1. That is a splendid example! Not, of course, in the sense of the angst the situation brought Van Gogh, but in how it captures so well our challenges in predicting the future. Wish I had thought of it when I was writing this post, thank you, Gwen!

      Folks don’t remember it now, but critics had some very negative predictions about the future of the iPod when it originally came out, same for the iPhone. Steve Jobs stick with it in both cases, and while it seems just as impossible to believe that folks didn’t recognize either technology or Van Gogh’s genius now, then … it was different.

      Terrific example, thank you so much!

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  11. EW,

    Around New Year’s, a program I listen to on the radio usually has people (both guests and callers) make predictions for the upcoming year. They then read the predictions that callers made the year before to see if any came true. It’s easy to predict that a volcano somewhere in the world will erupt or there will be an earthquake in the US. I remember a guest one year who was supposed to have psychic powers and allegedly had a high accuracy rating who predicted the presidential outcome. That prediction didn’t come true. As far as I know, that psychic hasn’t been back on that program. What I find most fascinating is that when people make predictions, they’re usually negative in nature, which almost feels like they’re wishing bad things into being. No thank you. I do think it’s fascinating that a human being now has an implant in their brain. While there is a lot of good that might come from that, I wonder if that outweighs what could go wrong. I predict that over the next few years, we’ll find out! 😉 Mona

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    1. That is so fascinating, Mona, what you shared about people preferring to make negative predictions. I knew that people gravitate towards reading/hearing/sharing negative news, this takes it to a whole new level!

      I was once in a lecture where every person got a penny to flip 5 times. It was a large room, with many people, and several of the people got the sequence that the lecturer said was “the one.” He then said, think about predictions, they can be as random as the coin tosses, and yet, if enough people make even random predictions, someone will be right. That doesn’t necessarily makes them more talented, more of right coin-toss-at-the-right-time. What’s difficult, he shared, was for any particular person to make consistently right predictions. What’s easier is for one in a thousand to make the right prediction at any given time.

      What do you think?

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  12. The variant of your opening quotation that I’m familiar with is “It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” It’s often attributed to Yogi Berra, to whom many sayings have been credited, both correctly and incorrectly. Quote Investigator looked into it:

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/

    As for how accurately people predict the future, I’ll conjecture that that ability, like so many human traits, is normally distributed—which is to say that if you graphed the success rates of each person in a sufficiently large population, the points would form a bell curve. We’d need research on a group of people over a substantial period of time to find out whether my conjecture is true.

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    1. Fascinating write-up: thank you for sharing! I’ve noticed it myself, that many quotes are mis-attributed and also misquoted and sadly, misunderstood? 🙃 I’ve become more cautious in attributing quotes, and more and more end up with “unknown” tags?

      That’s an interesting conjecture, though I wonder what the mean is. Given that more predictions are likely to be wrong than right (since there often is only one “right” answer but many “wrong” ones in predictions), wouldn’t you think that more people would be wrong most of the time, very few right every once in a while, and hardly any at all right several times (like Steve Jobs, who was right a spectacular 3 times in a row which made him, and Apple, what they are today)? That’s a fascinating question!

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      1. If I see a quotation on many websites but always with just the name of the supposed author and never any further information like the date or the publication it’s from, my default take is that the quotation has been misattributed. That’s almost always proved to be the case when I’ve managed to track down the original.

        You raise a good point about more wrong predictions than right ones. A researcher might still be able to do a study based on only two choices, right versus wrong, regardless of how many wrong choices are possible for a given subject.

        Another way to approach it is to examine what people have said would happen in each of a bunch of situations when there were only two choices. For example, in January of 2022 we could see how various people had answered the question of whether Russia was going to invade Ukraine. Which of the two main American political parties had each of the same people predicted would win the presidency in the last however-many American presidential elections? Etc.

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        1. I hear what you’re saying about there being two options, the right one and the wrong one. If we think about a coin toss, there are only two answers, and if the coin is fair, then either option is equally likely. But in an arithmetic problem, there is only one right answer and many wrong answers. Still two options, but it’s much more likely that guessing will lead to the wrong answer rather than the right one?

          As to predictions in a complex world, that’s a delightful question. There is one person that I’ve heard of that correctly predicted the outcome of every presidential election since 1984 (!!!)
          https://www.cbsnews.com/news/allan-lichtman-presidential-election-accurate-prediction-trump-biden/

          As for the other one:

          😀

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          1. As you said, in many situations there would be one right answer and many wrong answers, so the distribution is skewed rather than symmetric, and most people would give wrong answers most of the time. Even so, there could be some people who in the long run get a higher share of right answers than most other people.

            I hadn’t seen the Jay Leno video but I’m not at all surprised by so many people’s ignorance of world geography. I’ve watched other man-on-the-street interviews that revealed the same ignorance.

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          2. There’s fascinating work done by Hans Rosling where he shows how some people’s predictions are sometimes worse than guesses. For an extra bit of amusement, he uses chimps as a proxy for randomness, they select one of the choices a, b, or c and sometimes get better rate of correct responses than his test subjects 🤪

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          3. Yes, I read his book Factfulness five or six years ago. I gave away my copy and later repurchased the book. In fact I was browsing in it just a few days ago. I mentioned the book in a post two years ago [https://portraitsofwildflowers.wordpress.com/2022/01/03/icing-strikes-again/].

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        2. I should add that in introductory classes on probability and statistics, a common student mistake is to treat two options as if they were equally likely, when in reality one of the options occurs more frequently than the other. I even remember a secondary school math textbook that made that mistake. It showed a thumbtack that would be repeatedly tossed onto a flat surface and could land one of two ways each time: either with the head of the tack down and the shaft pointing up, or else with the tack tipped over so that the pointy tip of the shaft would touch the flat surface. There’s no reason to assume those two outcomes are equally likely, especially if the head of the tack is heavy, and yet the textbook assigned the same 50% probability to each of those two outcomes.

          One situation of not-equally-likely probabilities getting treated as if they are equally likely involves human births. A baby can be a boy or a girl, and most people assume the probability of each is 50%. If you look at birth statistics, however, you find that there’s a significant discrepancy. As the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques reports: “For every 100 girls, 106 boys are born, but males have a higher risk of dying than females, both in childhood and at adult ages.”

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          1. Indeed. Fair coin vs why a an open pb&j sandwich always falls pb&j side down 🤪

            As for the likelihood of male vs female births, don’t forget that there’s data that shows that in some countries, having boys is a blessing, and girls… not so much. I once learned that one of the earliest examples of writing was from ancient Far East (though it didn’t predate Sumer), and it was a prediction of when an auspicious birth would take place. Turns out it didn’t happen, since a girl was born.

            I’m curious, why are males more likely to die than females?

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          2. Women have been giving birth to more boys than girls for a long time. It’s only in our lifetime, thanks to medical and technological advances, that a pregnant woman can learn the sex of her baby before birth. I’ve read that under the one-child policy that the communist Chinese government imposed, some parents killed newborn girls to have a second chance at a boy. In any case, more boys than girls are born all over the world, not just in China.

            As for why more males than females die, one reason is that males are on average more aggressive and engage in riskier behavior, which therefore leads to more deaths. The male hormone testosterone plays a large part in that. And of course throughout history It’s overwhelmingly been men who wage war.

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          3. That is utterly fascinating, thank you for pointing me in that direction. I like how careful you were with your wording: women have been giving birth to more boys than girls, but at conception, there’s no bias!

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4413259/

            Certainly an area for exploration! Thank you for shedding light on it!

            Sadly, female infanticide has been practiced in many societies throughout human history. Think Sparta?

            Again, thank you for this new insight!

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  13. Fun post! When will people learn that you can’t stop the march of progress? That’s why everyone who is so worried about AI is just going to have to accept it as reality. It’s not magically going away.

    As for predictions, I invented spray-on tanning in college, so I guess you could say I saw the (bronze) light.

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    1. Thank you, Mark, I appreciate that! It’s funny (?) how the worst thing for so many of us is … change?

      Whoa! How did you come up with spray-on tanning? I once heard that Bell Labs, that invented the transistor never patented it…

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  14. I am the worst at making predictions. My brother and I used to take out ads in Psychology Today selling things like bogus Howard Hughes wills. Since we are related to Edgar Cayce, we once offered a list of our predictions for $5 or $10 bucks. We had great fun making something like 50 predictions for future years (e.g., tomatoes cause cancer discovery). We thought we would accidentally be right about something but decades later when we rediscovered our prediction list, not one single thing had happened.

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  15. Oh, another brilliant set up and question, EW! I suck at predicting the future. The saving grace is that I now it. It’s what keeps me focused on the moment thankfully because I’ve come to accept I know jack-diddly about what’s going to come next… 🙂 ❤

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    1. Thank you, Wynne, I can’t tell you how much that means to me!

      It’s not just a saving grace, I believe it’s a huge asset: how many of us have thick layers of wool over our eyes and yet we believe we know all there is to know? Isn’t it the wisdom that set Socrates apart from all the others, knowing that he was the wisest of all men then alive because he knew he knew nothing?

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  16. I’m utterly useless at predicting the future. I do find things like how the communicators resemble cell phones on star trek kind of amazing. Still waiting for flying cars and robot maids. Oh, and teleportation. Wouldn’t that be nice?

    I did hear on npr science friday, somewhat recently, that someone is developing a tiny communicator badge that takes video and, of course, connects you to the net answers your phone, etc. Also a la star trek.

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    1. I love that example: I actually saw the Star Trek clip that the person who patented the original cell phone said was what inspired him to invent it!

      Your words, in my mind, reflect Dennis Gabor’s “We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.” No, we cannot (accurately :D) predict the future, but we can shape it?

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