Everytime I take a look at it, it’s pretty much dead on, even now for instance, it’s raining and it says, “rain mixed with fog.”
How do they do this?
Define “pretty much dead on”. Is there fog today? How close do you need it to be to be a hit? How variable is the day-to-day weather where you are at this time of year? By the way, that van’s at the corner again.
They just make the predictions. People remember when a prediction is good, and forget all the bad ones. There are probably 200+ predictions for any given area; if they get 50 right over the course of the year, that’s what people remember.
And the predictions are vague enough that they’re easy to fudge. If you say “sunny” for most of the days in August, you’re going to be right most of the time.
Yes, there was fog this morning, thick fog. What van?
It’s a reference to the bias people impose on relatively random events. People remember when there is a van parked on the corner, but not when there isn’t a van parked on the corner. So it seems like it’s only there because you only remember the times when you see it. All the other times it makes no impact on you so you forget that 95% of the time it’s not there.
The Farmers Almanac gains a reputation by vague predictions and peoples’ bad memories. But it’s just pretty random.