_{As you can see from the above title, this is the sequel post or rather - more honestly - the second half of Human History X: The Ignorant Prophets. We talked about prediction and cognition and human endeavour, ran through a medley of mythological examples, then came back to a tangent about gamblers. Without further ado, we resume ...}

_{iron sharpens iron}

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another - Proverbs 27:17

Having said all that, I would be remiss not to point out the great irony that we are mostly quite terrible at predicting the future. Soothsayers and economists and stock brokers are nearly always wrong but always have a retroactive reason why they really weren't. They plant the seeds beforehand by keeping predictions sufficiently vague and cold-reading the supplicants to know what they want to hear so they can feed that back to them. Afterwards, they can tailor their response to events. Weak memories do the rest. For all our auguries and schemes, it seems to mostly come down to OODA Loops, spin-doctoring and luck. We don't really have prophets, we have competing PR departments.

In other words, humans aren't particularly good at predicting the future. What we are superlative at predicting is each other.

Whether in war or politics, in chess or checkers, in romance and rivalry, we are trying to find the same old answer: what's going to happen next? What will they do next? And after that? Given the knowledge we have of evolution, it is quite reasonable to suppose that our human intellect came because we were both predators and prey, sharpening our instincts against animals and the world and each other, honing them in both cooperation and competition (and sexual selection) until sense begat memory begat expectation begat the ability to anticipate. Now here we are.

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat It - George Santayana

Say! You know who is really good at predicting the future? Meteorologists.

We humans have a distressing tendency to transition from wonder to indifference almost in the blink of an eye. The fact that we can now reliably predict the weather days, sometimes weeks in advance, should be mind-boggling. Instead we complain about the 1% of the time they get it wrong and take the rest of it for granted. We have satellites and radar and, most of all, gigantic amounts of precisely modeled data that had math viciously done to it.

Which brings me to my next point.

Prediction (actual prediction as opposed to supernaturalist foolishness) is really the study of the past.

Consider the idea of Big Data. The weather I mentioned above, how long have humans been studying it? Recording it? Decades, centuries, even. Why? Same reason we studied the stars as astrologers and dug around in the entrails of dead animals as priests: to tell the future. The weather on the other hand is concrete and practical and unquestionable. Knowing when and where there will (or won't) be a blizzard or flood or a hurricane can reshape a society, alter human history. I doubt it took our antediluvian ancestors long to figure out the sequence of spring, summer, autumn (that's Fall to you Yanks) and winter and start plan their lives (and farms. And wars) accordingly.

For a more dramatic example, look to the two failed Mongol Invasions of Japan, rebuffed by the original kamikaze aka "divine winds" that saved their asses. If the Mongols had today's weather forecasting, they'd have shown up a few weeks early or a couple of days later and things would have gone veeery differently ...

_source

... but I digress. Big Data as applied to the concept of predicting the future is inseparable from it. All data really (you can't anticipate without expectation and you can't expect something if you don't already know about it) but these days, Big Data is the big thing. When we apply sharp eyes and unblinking algorithms to gargantuan accumulations of recorded history, details emerge, trends emerge. We track them down the steppes of the past, onto the pages of the present and then onward into the future ahead of our own strides. This applies to everything we have sufficient stores of records for. The weather, I've already mentioned but medicine? Genetics? Marketing? Psychology?

_{Market Psychology?}

Theeeeen we have Wall Street. Remember how I said we are terrible at predicting the world but pretty damn good at predicting each other? Well, the stock market is the perfect blend of the two. Folks there make money by "knowing" when a stock will go up so they avoid bull traps, catch falling knives and put shampoo on the head-and-shoulders.

Mostly kidding. They buy low and sell high OR buy high and sell higher (unless you're a short seller, then by all means, borrow high, sell high and then ... buy low? Man, high finance is confusing ... maybe I'll do a post about that 😀)

Anyway, why it's a perfect blend of predicting the future and predicting each other is that we are the market. Our buying and selling, our consumer choices, our fears and loves, all combine to make those squiggly lines move on the screen, make those numbers dance and make those hedge fund guys really really rich. Previously, I mentioned gamblers who would lose all pleasure in their sport if they could see the future because victory would become mechanical and mechanistic.

IMAGINE A REALLY HIGH-RES PICTURE OF A SLOT MACHINE RIGHT HERE

_NOPICTURES!

Not Wall Street types! They might love the excitement but they love the money far far more. Nothing would make them happier than to turn the market into a slot machine that comes back three cherries every time. This is because they are all about the money; prophecy is their fantasy. In the old days, it was the ice-cold disciplined investors like Warren Buffet who didn't get too excited, who just did it ploddingly and boringly and multiplied their wealth. Seeing the future by recognizing the cycles of the past. Kinda like weather, innit? Now, with faster and faster networks, more data to sift through and better algorithms to do the sifting, trading has gotten the point where it's now mostly being done by software that can buy stocks at $1 and sell it at $1.000001 a million times a second. Those algorithms don't so much see the future as they race closer to it, faces pressed to the windows of the bullet train.

Lastly and most simply, we have romantic relationships. We meet, we fall in love (without looking too heavily at the mechanics of it all, dopamine and oxytocin and all that boring chemistry stuff) and we generally pair-bond. The most relevant thing about all that to this is that, as with the gamblers in the previous post, there is no situation in which ignorance of the future is more prized -- or more unwise -- than between lovers. The flower of love most often blooms in the shadow of ignorance; we do so hate to learn the truth if it punctures a happy status quo.

---

To conclude, it is one of the great internal conflicts of the human project is we are forever caught between trying to predict the future and us not actually wanting to. Yet, we have no choice but to keep doing it. Prediction is our legacy. It is all we have ever done, it is in fact the root of our very intelligence. Our consolation? That we are the very future we are trying to predict, an effort as vast and grand and futile as a rushing river trying to catch itself in a basket.

---

And so ends my first completed two-parter post. Thank you for reading all the way to the end; I hope you were at least entertained. Anything more? Would be a bonus. Thanks again!

References

https://www.tacticalresponse.com/blogs/library/18649427-boyd-s-o-o-d-a-loop-and-how-we-use-it - Boyd's OODA Loop and How We Use it

The Life of Mammals: Human Mammal, Human Hunter (Youtube)

https://www.investopedia.com - Investopedia

Elsewhere

Sola

Twitter

You might also enjoy previous entries in this series (which is apparently a series now):

Human History X: The Mapmakers

Human History X: The Users and The Used

Human History X: The Ignorant Prophets Part One

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