The Soothsayers

I’ve been watching Wrong Tomorrow for a while now.  They are slow (investigating the claims by hand?), and the number of predictions is small.  This doesn’t matter.  They, as far as I know, are one of the first attempts to really add a searchable, reliable time dimension to public discourse.  Web sites are, of course, ephemeral – but once information is out there, it’s hard to take back.

For thousands of years we’ve had a record of one form or another.  It was always incomplete, and rarely objective.  We’ve relied on hearsay, rumors, journalists, authors, television shows, databases, court records, and a thousand other methods to keep track of what people did and said in the past.  What we’re keeping track of now is also incomplete, but since we have a lot of storage, we’re tracking a much larger scope of … reality.

This brings up an interesting question.  In the past, there have been people who claimed to be able to see the future.  Their predictions were often vague, and easily interpreted to mean one thing or another.  Those who really could predict the future through analysis or guessing were often ignored until it was too late.  Now, we have a nascent but growing ability for people to establish their historical record of soothsaying.

Think a bit about what that means.  If we choose, we can track literally anyone’s skill at predicting the future.  Those who are consistently correct can prove it, or at least give better evidence than hearsay or testimonials.  Those who are consistently wrong … well, why are we listening to them?  We should expect our public officials and pundits to be correct in their predictions.  Every book, every speech, every statistic, research claim needs to be recorded, tracked and scored.

When that happens, these sites are going to come under a lot of fire.  I hope they are ready for it. :)