Welcome to 2016 day one. Imagine if on today we could accurately predict what will happen in 2016? We could write a blog post with predictions and then gloat when they all come true!
Here are some of the outcomes I would like to be able to predict:
- Which movie will win best picture?
- Which candidates will win the democratic and republican nominations and from there win the Whitehouse?
- Which football team will win the Super Bowl and which baseball team will win the World Series?
- Which stocks should be bought and which should be sold?
But it’s hard to predict questions like these for several reasons. We don’t have all the facts and we don’t know how to rank the facts we do have. The facts can and most likely will change. And even if we have everything we need to make an accurate prediction, it would still only be a probability and even if an outcome is 99.999% likely to happen there is still a slim chance, 0.0001%, that it won’t happen.
One approach to predictions is to use the wisdom of the commons and just ask people what they think. This how opinion polls work. The problem here is that much of the time people don’t know their own opinions and how a question is asked creates bias towards an answer. Not to mention that people just change their minds over time which makes for stale predictions.
Another approach is to use the wisdom of the market and create a marketplace where people can bet on outcomes. This is really what the stock market is. The prices of Apple, Microsoft, or Alphabet shares aren’t a valuation of what those companies are worth today but what they will be worth at some point in the future. Sadly, the stock market has a spotty record at predicting the future health and success of a company.
And you can always ask an expert, usually the least accurate way to make a prediction, what she thinks is going to happen. There are enough experts out there that one or two, out of hundreds or thousands, ends up getting lucky and predicting accurate outcomes. There’s a movie out now about how 3-4 people predicted the mortgage crisis of 2008. Sometimes even if you know the future other people are not going to listen. They can’t! They are too invested in the present to make the changes needed to avoid catastrophe. And a thousand years from now we might lean that the financial meltdown in 2008 prevented a worse outcome!
Alan Kay and Abraham Lincoln both said “The best way to predict the future is to create/invent it.”
Given the difficulties involved in making accurate and reliable predictions and the nature of probability it best not to focus on guessing the future. IT is a more productive activity to help bring about the future that you want happen. Both Kay and Lincoln were pretty smart guys!
So here are some of the things I’d like to make happen in 2016…
- I’d like the Internet to go faster so I’m going to do my best to speed up the performance of websites, mobile apps, and services I’m responsible for. Waiting for resources to load is killing all of us. We don’t need new tools and frameworks to speed up the Internet. We just need to do our jobs better!
- I’d like there to be less misinformation and more accurate information available on the Internet so I’m going to encourage thoughtful, civil, responsible people to blog and post more. Maybe that will crowd out some of the noise.
- I’d like more people to enjoy Math and Science and coding so I’m going to be more an advocate of learning Calculus in middle age, keeping up with Science at any age, and learning to code from non-Computer Science backgrounds. (I love music, novels, and movies but Geometry and Algorithms deserve appreciation too!)
I predict these tasks will be tough but I’ll make some progress—especially since a whole lot of other people are working toward the same goals.