Prediction Pre-mortems
Tim Harford wrote this fascinating piece on the forecasting paradox and “prospective hindsight”. One sentence stood out to me, especially with the plethora of trend reports that float around at this time of year:
“Thinking seriously about the future can be a worthwhile exercise, not because the future is knowable but because the process is likely to make us wiser.”
Interesting.
Prediction Post mortems
It’s always worth reading Professor G’s 2025 predictions – what I love about them is that he always starts with his previous predictions and what he got right and what he got wrong. Vince pipedream: all people who produce trend reports to do the same thing each year. A report card and some common honesty would be good.
And on the subject of predictions, design agency Bompass & Parr have produced their future of food & drink report – if you can understand the sub headings, then read on – Strangescaping anyone? No? Okay, let me give you Savourmentality…
Primed for negativity?
Emmet O’Briain is someone to follow on LinkedIn – he never disappoints – and something he shared recently was again, fascinating. This time on the negative anecdote effect. Positive anecdotes don’t change people’s minds, negative ones do.
“While statistics or personal anecdotes highlighting the potential effectiveness of the policies didn’t improve policy judgments, a personal anecdote questioning or arguing against the effectiveness significantly lowered both belief in effectiveness and support.”
So our stories will influence one way more than the other.
Preparation is also key. Watching Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about how he prepares for telling a story is ace.
And if we are telling a story, the likelihood of us writing it down (by hand) seems to be disappearing, as we’re all losing the ability to do that.
“…a kind of collective self-gaslighting”
I’ve written about the drive towards average when it comes to research, but it’s everywhere. There are people who don’t want this… even if some of the trends are demonstrating the opposite. The author of this post is clear that we need to avoid being sucked into that age of average – this time focused on design.
He asks
“Is it in our collective best interests, as culture and as business to get sucked into the centre? Or is it time to reclaim our humanity and figure out a new way to use all this amazing technology to find a richer world around the edges?”
And finally…
Saturday 26th October 1985. Alas, not the day I was born, but in one of the greatest fan theories of all time, it turns out it’s the day that both Back to the Future AND The Goonies were both set. Amazing (if you’re my age and these films were 2 absolute staples of your teenage years).
More nostalgia, but this time of the Haptic kind (the poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing) – there are loads of classics in this thread, but my personal top three have to be;
- The *Ka-CHUNK* feeling when you loaded a tape into a VCR machine when it got it far enough in to take over and pull it in the rest of the way.
- Pulling the edges off of dot matrix printer paper.
- Popping the metal Nesquik can lid with a spoon.
And maybe that wonderful dull noise of the rotating of the date return stamp used by librarians before it slams into the book when at a library. Maybe they still have these?