2011 Predictions: mind blowing and amazing
My big secret project this year was extensive research into what will happen in 2011 and it hasn’t been easy.
My daily routine included reading a big bag of tea leaves every morning (the bag is called ‘the web’ by some), extensive alcohol abuse followed by extreme power napping, intense daily consultations with Nostradamus (I renamed my dog for this project), and of course a third mortgage on my soul for the necessary project funds.
It’s been a rough ride, but well worth it. I finished it this morning – here we go:
- 2011 will be mostly like 2010! The sun will not explode. Aliens will not land. You will look mostly like you did last year, and your time will be mostly spent doing the same things you did the previous 12 months. Your fears, dreams and complaints at the end of 2011 will be similiar to those at the end of this year.
- Some smart people will make insightful guesses about 2011, but be wrong and ignored! We are disasters at predicting the future, but some predictions are based on better thinking that other predictions. The problem is we we judge predictions in binary form, which is foolish.
- Some morons will make lucky guesses and be ‘right’ and be famous! You can always find someone who predicted something correctly, but this doesn’t mean they are wise, it likely means they were lucky. Some predicted the sub-prime crisis, but they may have been predicting a sub-prime crisis every year since the day they were born. It’s a big enough planet to always find someone who predicted whatever happens. This doesn’t mean much on its own. We should ask “what can we learn from this prediction” whether it’s right or wrong. Truly good predictions teach us something, even if wrong, but someone can have guessed right and teach us nothing.
- I will repost this for 2012 and not have to change a thing (other than the numbers).
Whoa…this IS mind-blowing… *poof*
Rich S: Clearly my mind was blown before I wrote it. Curious when you think about out it than mindblowing sounds rather painful and unpleasant. Wouldn’t mindgrowing be a better thing to say? Oh well.
Agree wholeheartedly and it reminds me a bit of Brian Tracy, where he says that he consults clients that in planning for next year, it will be a lot like this year…
You should team up with James Randi.
Randi has done some very cool work – http://www.randi.org/site/
You are already wrong on the last point, you’ll need to change the years..
Jason: fixed!
You know about the football pool scam?
Get a bunch of email addresses of people who bet on football (or you think they might). Send them a list of three predictions for the first week of the NFL season. Pick at least one upset. Here’s the key piece: Send a different set of predictions to each of 10 segments.
In week 2, send email only to segments where your 3 predictions were all correct. Send another round of 10 different selections.
Repeat this for as many weeks as you can hold out and still have a high number in your list. You’ve now got a list of people who have seen you correctly predict games with 100% accuracy for X weeks. Now you ask them to pay for your next set of predictions.
Start with a million addresses, stick mostly to the Vegas line (except for the one upset in each set), and you can probably get several tens of thousands of people who have seen you get 100% accuracy … even though you were choosing at random.
That being said, there are people who saw the real estate bubble and reported on it consistently. Some of them may have been lucky, but others were right. The fact that some of them were merely lucky doesn’t excuse the fact that none of the major newspapers, TV networks, or senior government officials talked about the bubble, and most still don’t acknowledge that the recession is almost entirely the result of its collapse.
Oh come on. Sure, predictions are meaningless intellectual junk food, but that doesn’t meant that they aren’t entertaining. I think that anyone making major life decisions based on a speculative blog post is an idiot, but who doesn’t enjoy turning their eyes skyward and dreaming of what might be?
Very funny.. Like tony the tiger.. your grrrrrrrrreat..
Can we hope for a new book? Perhaps the title can be along the lines of Making Accurate Predictions? :)
Entering this page with my mind Pre Blown was a good idea, I mean wow you actually took the time to think this through, write it down and then post it on the net ! Dude you gotta get out more