From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Dec 10 1999 - 19:47:06 MST
Robin Hanson, <rhanson@gmu.edu>, writes:
> It seems like I must know a half dozen people who are better futurists than
> 99% of these commentators (many of which have been on this list). But as
> far as I know none of these people have been asked to write millennial
> futurist articles. Either the media aren't really interested in credible
> futures, or they have no idea how to distinguish them.
How do you judge the quality of a futurist though, without waiting for
the future to happen? Do you consider someone a good futurist on the
basis of a track record of successful predictions? Or is it more that
his predictions seem relatively plausible?
One thing you can do is to identify bad futurists because their scenarios
are internally inconsistent. As a trivial example, Star Trek is a bad
prediction of the future; many of their technologies should change the
fundamentals of their society, and their economic system doesn't seem to
be consistent with how they show people behaving. Perhaps similar
problems can be identified with shorter-term technological predictions.
Hal
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