Bad Prediction Quotes & Sayings

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction. — China Mieville

No one knows the future, yet we can't stop guessing while expecting of only the good, and not the bad or even both. — Auliq Ice

[A]s for my prediction that [the iPhone] would be a bad idea for Apple to pursue, anything can still happen. Time is a cruel mistress. — John C. Dvorak

It is often possible to make a profit by being pretty good at prediction in fields where the competition succumbs to poor incentives, bad habits, or blind adherence to tradition - or because you have better data or technology than they do. It is much harder to be very good in fields where everyone else is getting the basics right - and you may be fooling yourself if you think you have much of an edge. — Anonymous

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. — David Foster Wallace

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who is right or wrong, admirable or selfish, a good guy or a bad guy. My conclusion is instead a prediction, based on what I have seen happening in the past. Businesses have changed when the public came to expect and require different behavior, to reward businesses for behavior that the public wanted, and to make things difficult for businesses practicing behaviors that the public didn't want. I predict that in the future, just as in the past, changes in public attitudes will be essential for changes in businesses' environmental practices. — Jared Diamond

You don't need to predict the future. Just choose a future
a good future, a useful future
and make the kind of prediction that will alter human emotions and reactions in such a way that the future you predicted will be brought about. Better to make a good future than predict a bad one. — Isaac Asimov

I think political science is bad at prediction. We don't gaze into a crystal ball. I do not believe that we predict things. — Ian Bremmer