I was looking at the thread, “Self-Driving Cars are Still Decades Away”. I was thinking that it is a pretty safe prediction because it will take years to prove whether the OP is right or wrong in his prediction, and the thread will be buried and forgotten by then.
Then I got to thinking about how long the SDMB has been around. Decades, in fact, so enough time has passed to show whether or not predictions made, say, twenty years ago actually turned out to be accurate. For example, suppose, at the turn of the century, someone posted that this century would be over quickly because the world is going to end in 2012. The passage of time would have shown that to be wrong.
So, I’m just wondering if there are threads of that nature buried here that, over the time, show that the OP had brilliant predictive powers or a dud of a prediction.
Sadly, I think you’d have to know specific threads of posters. And maybe even plow thru many posts to find predictions.
I seem to remember an old thread about “Who would still be here after 20 years?” Many, many posters chimed in “I will” and why.
I doubt alot of them are still here and/or post much the ones who are. Or deceased.
Some great ones are tho’
Ok, quick search produced 100s of math threads. Not readin’ that.
Some political campaign predictions.
And one or two predictions about a Survivor TV show winner and one about the who would take Alex’s place on Jeopardy.
Many of us in early 2016 wrote about how unlikely a Trump victory was, and we never could imagine it. I believe some accurately predicted the calamity.
I have an article from Future Life magazine, predicting the wondrous things that are going to happen in the 80s, and beyond. It was written with the input of several famous futurists. It covers medicine, social, fashion, textiles, space, transportation, mining.
It’s hilariously pie in the sky delusional. They predicted things by 1990 that still aren’t happening or even possible.
SPIN magazine used to have a column about AIDS, and in the early 1990s, an ID specialist said, “In 10 or 15 years, AIDS will mostly be a disease of drug addicts, and you won’t hear much about it.” I was skeptical about this, as I am of other futurist predictions, but in this case, s/he was right.
A while back, C-SPAN’s monthly program “In Depth” had Ray Kurzweil, whom I’d never heard of at the time, on as a guest for this 3-hour interview program, and one of the first callers launched into a rant that included the phrase “this crackpot.” And when he started talking about nanobots, that’s when I realized the caller was probably right.
Way back in the innocent days of August 2015, I was sure Trump didn’t really want to be president, and would drop out before the election. So I created this poll:
The actual poll post did not survive the transition to Discourse, but I found it on Way Back and reposted it after the 2020 election. For your convenience, here it is:
Although people were allowed to vote for 15 months, only 14 out of 179 respondents imagined that he could actually win.
So although I and my OP certainly fall in the “dud of a prediction category,” along with most of the other posters and voters, a small percentage of us showed “brilliant predictive powers.” Unfortunately.
I don’t recall the details, but there was a thread bumped a week or two ago that had a comment in it accurately predicting when it was going to be bumped, and a few other details.
My thread from July, 2016 asking who our next president will be is interesting to look back on. It was a poll, but it seems the new software ate the poll portion of it; the comments are fun to read, though.
A few examples:
Hillary in a landslide
Clinton. She won the moment Trump became the endorsed Republican candidate
It is going to be Clinton. It was always going to be Clinton
I hate to admit it, but Trump is going to win
I’m horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency
Americans won’t fall for Trump … at least not enough Americans will
Of course, some don’t need very much time at all to tell. I remember a Game Room thread where someone kept on insisting that computers could never possibly bluff successfully, even after people pointed out that poker-bots existed that could consistent beat the top humans, and had existed for years at that point.
In the US, maybe. It’s still a pretty big deal in Africa.
