#prediction

Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?" "Sounds like a Japanese game show." Kat straightens her shoulders. "Okay, we're going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you're a science fiction writer." Okay: "World government... no cancer... hover-boards." "Go further. What's the good future after that?" "Spaceships. Party on Mars." "Further." "Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere." "Further." "I pause a moment, then realize: "I can't." Kat shakes her head. "It's really hard. And that's, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century. ↗

— Robin Sloan

#futurism #game #imagination #inspirational #imagination

«“Looks like your sci-fi prediction came true right away, Xavier.” “That can be gratifying,” mused the novelist. “But not all the time.”» ↗

— Bruce Sterling

#prediction #scifi #love

I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airport road. We then moved east toward the bank-edge along a disused road with vegetation rising to five feet in the center between the tire paths. We should have found our hybrids but we did not. The Cerion agassizi simply stopped about two hundred yards north of our first ribby Cerion. Then we realized that a pond lay just to our east and that ribby forms, with their coastal preferences, might not favor the western side of the pond. We forded the pond and found a classic hybrid zone between Cerion agassizi and ribby Cerions. (Ribby Cerion had just managed to round the south end of the pond, but had not moved sufficiently north along the west side to establish contact with C. agassizi populations.) I wanted to shout for joy. Then I thought, "But who can I tell; who cares?" And I answered myself, "I don't have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need? ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#prediction #understanding #nature

Having established that good ideas do indeed come in from the cold, start on the fringes and become mainstream, can we make any predictions about what the next move will be? ↗

— Nigel Farage

#any #become #cold #come #established

Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that. ↗

— Steven Chu

#could #go #higher #ipcc #levels

If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false. ↗

— M. H. Abrams

#decades #false #having #learn #lived

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past. ↗

— Robert Nozick

#been #degree #describing #future #historical

I've ceased making predictions on things because we'll see how they turn out. ↗

— David Plouffe

#ceased #how #i #making #out

We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way. ↗

— Nate Silver

#estimates #get #our #predictions #right

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation? ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#billions #country #even #forecast #foundation