It’s that time of year again when many in the media unveil their predictions for the upcoming year. Occasionally, they’ll even review their predictions from the previous year and rate themselves on how accurate they were. They ask experts for predictions covering everything from AI to war to politics to the economy to the stock market to weather to business and more.
It seems to me that the only qualifications required for bolding making a prediction and announcing it to the public is having a mouth. Sure, sometimes the predictors are experts in their respective fields. But nonetheless, their success in predicting the future seems random, or only slightly better, at best.
They sound good though.
Then there’s the non-experts, like me and, I suspect like most media people. Their predictions are totally pulled out of thin air. You might as well ask the Magic 8 ball.
So whenever I hear someone spewing on about the end of democracy, World War III, the end of humanity, or some other prediction of doom, I think to myself, “If you could predict the future, you’d be extremely rich already and wouldn’t be doing this podcast, participating in this interview or writing this article.”
I learned my first lesson about predicting the future when I was working as a lifeguard at a Senior Center in the late 80s. I had a lot of downtime. Once I had completed all of my schoolwork, I’d read through the center’s stack of old Newsweek and Time Magazines. It was eye opening to read about all of the political news and predictions from just the previous 12 months and see how completely wrong they were. Literally, almost everything predicted turned out to be wrong.
Not much has changed.