[SEQ RERUN] Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods

badger

Today's post, Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods was originally published on April 10, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

The Friedman Unit is named after Thomas Friedman who called "the next six months" the critical period in Iraq eight times between 2003 and 2007. This is because future predictions are created and consumed in the now; they are used to create feelings of delicious goodness or delicious horror now, not provide useful future advice.

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This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Inductive Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods was originally published on April 10, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

The Friedman Unit is named after Thomas Friedman who called "the next six months" the critical period in Iraq eight times between 2003 and 2007. This is because future predictions are created and consumed in the now; they are used to create feelings of delicious goodness or delicious horror now, not provide useful future advice.

I am surprised that this post appeared on OB, and even had (independently) a comment about staking money on predictions and a comment written by Robin Hanson, without eliciting a mention of ideas futures. So I'll go ahead: if you actually care about predicting the future--or just getting people not to listen to silly predictions--I suggest creating and consulting a market. If social and institutional barriers make this proposal infeasible or unhelpful, I suggest chipping away at them (or at least thinking about how effectively you could chip away at them).

I would suggest just plain writing down your predictions and keep track, or even just predicting on an existing corpus. Waiting for prediction markets is letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.