Lunch at the Labs

Predicting the future.

The Long Bets web site allows participants to post bets on (very) long-term future technology developments and trends. Bet money is a tax-deductible donation to the The Long Now Foundation which invests it; half of the growth of the money goes to support the foundation and half accrues to the winner's specified charity.

What I like about this is it maintains a record of what people say will happen in the future. The public media is full of people predicting this and that, but I (almost) never see these same people held accountable for their wrong predictions (although you sure hear about it when they are right). Some TV programs like Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street actually compound the problem by just having back those who guess right, giving a distorted view of the overall accuracy of their guests. I would like to see a web site which maintains a record of who said what and when, giving an accuracy grade for those pundits who you see time and again on all those news and business shows. There are some stock market pundits who have been completely wrong in predicting the stock market for the past two years and they are are still constantly hawking their views to the public.

Posted by mjm at July 27, 2002 11:10 PM