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Johnicholas comments on Reference class of the unclassreferenceable - Less Wrong
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Would you buy:
"After something happens, we will see the occurrence as a part of a pattern that extended back before that particular occurrence."
The Wright Brothers may have won the crown of "first", but there were many, many near misses before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine
And if superintelligence were created tomorrow, people would choose new patterns and say exactly the same thing, and they'd probably even be right. So what?
The original article went too far in the direction of "the future will be like the past", but you may have overcorrected.
Was it you who said something like "The future will stand in relation to the past as a train smoothly pulling out of a station - and yet prophesy is still difficult."?
Scavenging the past for preexisting patterns isn't as sexy as, say, working out scenarios for how the world might end in the future, recursively trying to understand understanding, or prophesying the end of prophesy. Because it's not as sexy, we may do too little of it.
Trying to understand patterns on a sufficiently deep level for them to be stable, and projecting those patterns forward to arrive at qualitative and rather general predictions not involving e.g. happy fun specific dates, is just what I try to do... which is here dismissed as "the Inside View" and rejected in favor of "that couldn't possibly happen for the first time", which is blessed as "the Outside View".
Have you had any successes?