Those Evil Futurists

Some of the Snake-Oil Salesman tricks of futurists:

There’s a success hiding in every failure. Let’s say you predicted that something would happen, and it hasn’t. Is your career over? Of course not. Tetlock found that after a certain point, expertise becomes a hindrance to effective forecasting, because experts are better able to construct erudite-sounding (or erudite-feeling) rationalizations for their failure. Here’s how to benefit from this valuable talent.

* Make predictions that are hard to verify. Be fuzzy about timing: it’s always safest to say that something will happen in your lifetime, because by definition, you’re never around to take flak if you’re wrong.
* Find similar events. Maybe you predicted that we’d all watch TV on our watches. Instead, we watch YouTube on our computers. That’s pretty close, right? Point proved.

Shock! Horror!