What seemingly rational or normal beliefs of today will be discredited in 100 years?

Great Debates
61

Fifty years ago?

Try 20. Well, 23.

Back in 1980 the People’s Almanac folks, who did “The Book of Lists,” put out “The Book of Predictions,” which had a bunch of stuff in it about fortune tellers past and present. Part of the book was a great many predictions for the future (post-1980) by a great many people, some of them experts in various fields.

All the predictions these supposedly learned people made for the future between 1980 and 2003 were wrong. I don’t mean 51% of them, or two thirds of them, I mean ALL OF THEM, with maybe 5 exceptions out of 1000 predictions. They were just universally out to lunch; not one of them had any sort of an accurate idea of what the world would be like even five or ten years into the future. They couldn’t have been more wrong if they tried.

The great majority of the wrong predictions were a result of one of two fallacies. Either they

  1. Assumed that current statistical trends would continue, and extrapolated the future from said trends, (for instance, many predicted that inflation would make the dollar totally worthless within 5-10 years… because inflation was very high in 1980) - we’ll call this the Twain Fallacy,

Or

  1. Based predictions on their own consciously or subconsciously held biases. (the Roddenberry Fallacy)

#2 is what we’re seeing with all the folks who predict an end to religion. It’s obviously based on a personal bias that they would LIKE to see a world without religion, there’s not really any rational basis for predicting such a thing will come to pass. Human beings have held onto some sort of supernatural belief for tens of thousands of years. Saying that now because you think atheism is great the entire species is going to move towards it is… well, it’s wishful thinking at best.

Same thing with the predictions of great acceptance of homosexuality, polygamy, bisexuality, etc. Increased tolerance for these things is the exception, not the rule, and is presently well regarded only in some demographics of some industralized countries, and then just in the last 10-50 years or so. I predicted that wouldn’t last (a wild guess, I’ll freely admit) only because it’s simply logical to assume that the VAST majority of human experience on the subject is that homosexuality is treated as taboo. I really, really, really hope I’m wrong, but if I had to bet money on it I’d bet on the house. I don’t see ANY logic in believing that a current short-term trend seen in a fraction of human society is going to be a species-wide trend. The many predictions for what the Internet will do for us are all probably wrong too - hell, those predictions are already collapsing.

I think a more logical way of trying to predict the future is to apply the Plexiglass Principle; things tend to return to the middle. A current social fad will probably not last, and may very likely even be replaced by the exact opposite belief. Trends will swing back to normal. If inflation is bad, it will probably get better. Weak nations or regions get stronger. Strong nations or regions get weaker. Shortages of resources will be made up by other resources. Surpluses will be squandered or spent. Violent regions will become peaceful, and peaceful regions will become violent. Even technological progress has not been a continuous forward motion.

When you get right down to it, predicting the future is impossible. But generally speaking, I think you can assume things will tend to move back and forth across the norm.

62

So do you expect race relations to worsen in the future? What about a regression on gender equality?

63

I think those are very distinct possibilities, Homebrew, but it depends what you mean by “race relations.” If you mean any sort of conflict between different ethnicities or nationalities, I challenge you to show me evidence that race relations in the world ever got any BETTER. Local differences come and go - for instance, the Arab-Jewish conflict was nigh on nonexistent in 1800, but the English-French conflict was a big deal and everyone at the time would have said that was a conflict between “Races” - but overall, we’ve been fighting each other for millennia and I see no reason to think the future will be any different in that regard.

With respect to gender equality, it is quite possible that there will be significant regression in that regard, too. Maybe not within an even 100 years, though - that may be too short a time frame. But maybe not.

64

Not a great thought in the league of some of the other suggestions here.
But I believe in 100 years time, people will look back at the aggrivation that people put up with to travel by plane. Economy seeting, over booking, etc. and see this as quaintly masochistic as cheap seat steam train carridges and roofless cars seem to us.

65

Oh, good. Enough of this democracy and liberty and middle-class wealth. Back to feudalism and peasantry and aristocracy and slavery!

Aside from this, my prediction: somewhere between 100-200 years from now, “privacy” as a concept will be mostly gone, or at least untenable, what with increasingly cheap and invasive surveillance of all types available to govts. and individuals alike.

66

The idea that interstellar travel is impossible will fall away just like past ideas about practical travel speed/distance limitations.

67

Ummm…Middle Class wealth is dissappearing like a mirage here in the US.

Some of us would say the same for democracy.

68

I’d like to retract some of my comment about religion.

I think we’re working towards an end of organized religion. People may become far more spiritual. There are some that want to pray more than five times a day, or a day other than Sunday. That spirituality can exist without God telling you what to eat or how to dress.

Wasn’t this a big part of the reformation a few hundred years ago? The notion that I can pray directly to God without the need for a priest or a cardinal to help me. Could there be another push in this stream, away from defining your religion based on someone else’s notion?

69

That abortion is not the taking of a life and that viability was a never more then a sophist justification.

70

**Things tend to return towards the middle, ** eh?
There may be a technological singularity, as predicted by Vernor Vinge among others, which might just shift the location of the middle substantially.
Nevertheless, very good post, RickJay. The truth of the matter is that prognosticators can only be certain of one thing- that almost nothing they predict will come true.

Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

71

Everyone has every common disease… at least that is what happens when there is a new theory on mental illness. Either everyone will be doped up, or no one. Electric shock? hmmm.

72

Everyone has every common disease… at least that is what people think, when there is a new theory on mental illness. Either everyone will be doped up, or no one? Electric shock? hmmm.

73

Well, well, well. Flight Commander Biggles posts again…

So, what exactly does your post mean, Arfur ?

Translate it out of English and into English, for the rest of us.

74

Did it ever occur to him that he made a mistake? “I got a different answer from everybody else so everybody else must be wrong!” He sounds like a quack or at least a bit of a nut.

As for the question about whether the pressure acts over a larger surface area on the top of the wing…Well, I think the net force in the downward direction is going to be proportional to the dot product of the surface normal and a unit vector pointed downward…so the effect of having more area will cancel out in terms of the downward force (I think).

You gotta be a little more skeptical of people challenging the conventional wisdom. I am all for questioning authority but it has to be done intelligently. Otherwise, it amounts to trumping knowledge with ignorance. (I.e., “I don’t understand how airplanes can fly using Bernouli’s principle and therefore I don’t believe they can even though there are lots of people who have worked through this and even built airplanes based on these equations.”)

75

Except that evidence for the nuclear family goes back at least 2000 years - Jesus, Joseph, and Mary for one family, and assorted documented Roman families (q.v. Julius Caesar) - if not from the dawn of time. Though I can’t bring to mind a cite from Classical Greece, their culture was based on the nuclear family; the Egyptian Pharoahs seemed to have fairly nuclear families. The trouble here is that ancient texts tend to deal with monarchs who by virtue of their position, tended to have more than one wife, not to mention numerous slaves.

76

But it is not conventional wisdom and does not have authority. I don’t know what its origins are but physicists and other aerodynamics experts today agree that the Bernoulli effect plays little part in flight (at least, that was my impression when I was working in an academic physics department). Google Bernoulli and airplane and you’ll see. A very detailed discussion by experts is here: http://www.aa.washington.edu/faculty/eberhardt/lift.htm

77

Forgot to add one that my father believes, and that I sorta think will happen (neither of us thinks it would be a good thing though):
There will arise a movement advocating children’s sexual rights.

78

The idea that no object can move faster than the speed of light will have been brought into serious question. I’m not saying that we’ll have spacecraft moving at Warp 6. If we’re lucky, we’ll have succeeded in getting a couple protons to go faster than light. But we’ll be fairly certain it’s possible.

Religion isn’t going anywhere because science can never explain everything. I think many dogmatic, fundamentalist beliefs may fall by the wayside, however. But I think Christianity, Islam, and all the other major religions will still exist, if not be thriving. Remember, in 2,000, the core beliefs of Christianity have barely changed one iota. How those beliefs are practiced has evolved constantly though.

The idea that health care is a privilege, and not a right, will be dead. Since that is already accepted in many Western countries, I don’t imagine it will take forever to spread to the U.S. and elsewhere.

I actually think the question of abortion will become irrelevant, as we’ll come up with increasingly effective, easy-to-use ways of preventing unwanted pregnancies. And in the rare cases of unwanted pregnancies, we’ll develop a way to transplant a fetus into the womb of a woman that wants it.

The idea that people were once born with diseases or were condemned to develop them later on, simply because of their genetics, will seem bizarre, thanks to advances in genetic engineering.

79

Preview is my friend.

I meant to say, “In 2,000 years…”

Preview is my friend.

80

Some claim that they fly via Newton’s third law and the Coanda effect. Put the curved-out part of a spoon under a stream of water from tap. See how it moves along the curve and then shoots off in a direction opposite the curved-out direction? They say that’s how planes fly. Rather than pressure differentials, the air molecules are being pulled down (relative to the orientation of the plane) and the equal & opposite reaction is to pull the plane up.

I’m not going to enter that actual debate, but this site should give you a good start. Evidently it is endorsed by NASA, for what that’s worth. www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/coanda.htm