Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.
Lao Tzu
Those who have knowledge
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I think that it was Freeman Dyson, in one of his books, where he mentioned that he made a living “preaching” how things “should be”, or “warning” “if this goes on”, rather than “predicting” what “will be”.
People didn’t want to pay for predictions, but that was in the days of the “Future Shock” lectures that everybody was forced to sit through.
The “rule of thumb” that “Future Shock” lectures always mentioned was, that if you were 60 years old, then you had lived through 60% of all technological change. 70 years was 70%, etc… That literally worked for a time, but I think collapsed in the past few decades.
– My dad was born in the early 1920s and remembers watching Zeppelins roaring up the Monongahel River Valley, he also served in the Horse Cavalry in the National Guard before the War, and had a hard time with the “Buck Rogers” aspect of the Space Shuttle.
The “Future Shock” lectures actually worked, and were based on the lived experience of most people, the shared “context” of lived experience, but some time over the past 30 years that “shared context” has vanished, along with the collapse of any real history lessons in what passes for school these days.
I am usually curious and pay attention, yet I missed some transition that occurred when I apparently wasn’t looking. Yikes!
More dated received wisdom.
In his day people weren’t paid millions for making predictions. Especially if they can make a credible claim to have knowledge or, better, verifiable data. So yes, fols with knowledge do make predictions and the bank accounts reflect it.