I have a weird hobby. I carry around forecasts in my head. I can’t tell you what I had for dinner last night, I forget where things are around the house on a regular basis, but I can absolutely remember a friend who sent me a link that said the ramifications of the Covid lockdowns in America had created ripple effects that would see the whole world economy crumble “soon.” At the same time, I had another friend that sent me a link explaining how stopping the lockdowns was going to lead to a collapse of the healthcare industry and we would be burying folks in mass graves “soon.”
Covid was an “unprecedented time” though, right? A fluke of a thing that nobody could have predicted, except for all the folks that had been screaming about a worldwide pandemic for decades before it came along. Those folks said it was not so much a question of “if” something would happen but “when” something would happen. Turns out they were right in the generalities if not the particulars.
Sort of like the forecast that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. Not a question of “if” Ukraine would be crushed under Russian boots but “when.” Of course, that invasion was supposed to be the end of Ukraine within, what, a week? Paul Ehrlich famously set forth that the world would starve to death decades ago. Musk said in 2016 that we were going to reach Mars by 2025 along with his never-ending self-driving and robotaxi forecasts for the past two decades or so. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth had all sorts of forecasts that just flatly failed to come to fruition, while at the same time teaching the world about climate change in a way that was “directionally correct.” I am reminded of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their constantly “corrected” reports that, nevertheless, are really fucking important to pay attention to. How about Nate Silver’s forecast that Hillary Clinton had over a 70% chance of winning the 2016 election and he was closer to right than pretty much everyone else? A decade later, Trump’s assumption that the Iran war would be over in a week or two seems laughably (and depressingly) wrong at this point.
Yeah, my eyes glazed over just pulling all of these out of the swamp in my head, so let’s move on.
Fluke
I just finished Fluke by Brian Klaas and I loved it. The blurb right now on that Goodreads link references Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Taleb’s The Black Swan, both of which I’ve also read. I reviewed The Black Swan here, though I would honestly recommend Fluke way before Black Swan. So this is obviously my kind of book. Fluke is, and I’m quoting the author himself here, a book written by a “disillusioned social scientist.” That is, a guy that was deeply embedded into thinking the world of humans could be understood, predicted, and categorized before things like Donald Trump and Covid happened. Now he’s embraced chaos theory and it’s pretty glorious coping.
His book, in essence, boils down to there not being nearly as much predictability or “reason” behind things happening as everyone wants to believe there is. His book is an illustration that, no, the world doesn’t make much fucking sense and, no, things are not controllable. I think he might even disagree with me that the only thing you can control is yourself because he’s a little more into determinism than I am. But I adored all the pieces he’s pulled together. He referenced a number of things I already knew and taught me some new ones as well. I have been thinking about Keats’ negative capability since the moment Klaas put it in my brain.
Klaas’ answer to what I think of as the “Cassandra Problem” is to not even try.
Cassandra
The deal with Cassandra was that she was a Trojan princess and a priestess of Apollo gifted with perfect knowledge of the future that nobody believed. She knew every disaster that was coming and was powerless to get anyone to listen or change anything. She walked to her own murder knowing it was coming.
Gotta love the Greek classics.
Nowadays, though, you can always find someone to believe. You can always find someone to give you a plausible explanation of anything and then poke around a bit and get a plausible reversal of the first thing you found. Close the world or we’ll have mass graves as the hospital system collapses or open the world back up before the world economy collapses. Flee America before it collapses into a dictatorship run by an eighty-year-old senile man. Which eighty-year-old senile man? Depends on who you ask.
We used to be able to stuff Cassandra into a temple and let her rot and enjoy the quiet. Now, every Cassandra has an audience, a bullhorn, and a desperate need for attention. Along with a financial incentive to shape their message in just the right way and to never, not ever, admit they were wrong. Cassandra only spits truth, you understand? If Cassandra ever said something that turned out to be completely fucking false, well, that was a fluke that will never happen again.
Such is modern living. A million Cassandras, all getting it wrong most of the time, but you’re okay with that as long as she’s telling you something that validates your priors.
Frustration
The result of my hobby, where I carry around lots of forecasts from others, and a bunch of my own, is that I’m painfully aware that we all get it wrong more often than not. In fact, I think much of the time when we get it right what is actually happening is, well, a fucking fluke. Ain’t none of us that smart.
When I think about my own predictions, two things stand out. First, that none of mine are nearly as certain as your average Cassandra. I do not say “this will happen” so much as “well, I could see it going this way?” Second, mine are not so goddamn extreme. I have never made a prediction about something “collapsing.” Never seen an “end of the world” coming. I live my life as best I’m able, preparing for the nasty eventualities, but always trying to remember that the Cassandras of the world have invariably been wrong about it all.
The secret, I think, is to find a worldview and personal approach to life where it’s okay to have been wrong. This is maybe my largest frustration with the world — that we cannot admit to being wrong. Ehrlich up there went to his grave still not admitting that his absurd predictions about the end of the world were absurd. You choose your Cassandra and you shine a light on when she’s got it right and you turn your face away whenever she gets it wrong. No humility needed, just a little bit of self-deception, a little bit of disdain or screaming for anyone who didn’t pick your Cassandra, and you’re good to go in the modern world.
It just seems like an unutterably sad way to live.
Squirt Says…
I think that you should not follow one person holding every prediction they say as some undivided truth, but maybe multiple following one or two truths that you think may be right because no one person can tell what the future holds thus I would say that it's better to stick to yourself then others predictions.
Dad Responds…
Absolutely agree. Not only is it not following one person but it’s realizing that even if a person is wrong in ways you see as obvious doesn’t mean that they aren’t absolutely right in other ways. No one person gets it all right, and what follows from that is that no one person gets it all wrong either.
