Accurate predictions lead to winning strategies and tactics in elections, in court cases, and in passing or blocking legislation.
Many are the predictions made by DK members about everything of interest, notably election outcomes. Some turn out to be correct, some not.
We have a collective interest in finding those among us who have the knowledge, reasoning ability, or whatever-it-takes to make accurate predictions. We should also start ignoring those whose predictions are consistently wrong, so as to not waste time and effort going down the wrong trail on issues of the day.
A prediction is not the same thing as “what you want to happen.” Each of us “wants” various things to happen (“Bernie!” “Hillary!”). But wishing doesn’t make it so. Election outcomes don’t just “happen”: political activism causes them. Predictions are useful for directing the course of activism, not for providing excuses for sitting on one’s derriere. Predictions are forecasts, and then it’s up to us to do the work that influences the course of events.
This is the first of a series of weekly stories that will serve to collect predictions in the comments. You can (and should) make your own predictions here. You can also copy others’ predictions from their stories and comments and provide links to the originals. The latter is not “calling people out,” it’s collecting data for us to analyze. I’m going to try to publish one of these each Monday morning right through the general election. I’m starting mid-week this time, but it’ll be Mondays next time and thereafter. It’s OK to bookmark these stories and come back to them any day of the week when you have a prediction about something that occurs before the following Monday.
I’m not going to comment about predicted events in the comments in these stories, because I don’t want my biases or expectations to influence our predictions. I might make a few predictions of my own here, which should be taken as no better or worse than anyone else’s until the events do or don’t occur.
The goal of this exercise is to find the accurate predictors, so we can learn from their expertise and methods, and improve our collective accuracy at anticipating events.
Here are some topics in which we’re all consistently interested, and you can add your own if you like:
= Primary election outcomes.
= Supreme Court and other significant court decisions.
= Legislative outcomes: bills passed and bills blocked.
= Scientific findings published in peer-reviewed journals.
= Terrorist attacks and mass murders.
= Developments in military conflicts.
Be as specific as possible. Saying “so-and-so will win the primary in such-and-such state” isn’t as good as providing numbers, such as percentages of vote totals, or percentage difference between candidates, or demographic details also with numbers. For court cases, describe the reasoning you expect to see in the decisions. For scientific findings, provide a little background in the field so we have context. Etc.
Predictions based on known facts and logical reasoning are always good. But so are “intuition” and “hunches,” since human brains are good at inferring outcomes without knowing exactly how they reached their conclusions. Dreams may also be useful since, according to current cognitive science, dreams occur as the brain is consolidating experiences and knowledge into long-term memory. Over time we can examine what’s going on with all of these, to try to get at the subconscious reasoning involved in accurate hunches.
There are a couple of hypotheses I’d also like to test, having to do with the big-picture issues of causal determinism and indeterminacy as they relate to the question of free will. For these I’ll be selecting random number strings, and your goal is to predict the random numbers that will be selected and appear in the following week’s story. One string will be drawn from a deterministic source, one from a nondeterministic source. The strings will take the format “deterministic: 12-34-56-78-90” and “nondeterministic: 12-34-56-78-90” where the digits are drawn from the two random sources. Each week, you can make a prediction for both types, and we’ll see how you do the following week when the random numbers are drawn.
When you make a random number prediction, state your position on free will: that it does or does not exist, and if it does exist, roughly how much of human decisions and behaviors are freely-chosen vs. causally-determined. I’ll say more about the hypotheses after we wrap up this exercise in November, but not before.
I’m also interested in two specific types of paradoxical cases:
1) Accurate grasp of facts & sound reasoning, but prediction is mistaken.
2) Inaccurate grasp of facts and/or incorrect reasoning, but prediction is correct.
The latter type (2) is different to “hunch/intuition,” because the person seeks to base a prediction on facts and reasoning, but they make a mistake somewhere, and none the less their prediction turns out to be correct.
Each week we can look back on the previous week’s predictions of events, to see who was on-target and who missed. If you are making longer-range predictions, it will help if you point them out in a subsequent week when the events occur or don’t occur as you predicted.
OK folks, let’s go for it.
We can do better than those pesky pundits & prophets on TV.