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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe "Jeane Dixon Effect"
Jeane Dixon is popularly known as the psychic who "predicted the assassination of JFK", and is probably the best known demonstration of what is known as "confirmation bias".
If you want to do well in the prediction business, you do the following:
1. Make a lot of predictions
2. Promote the ones that "came true" or ones for which you can shoehorn the facts into it "sorta, kinda" happened.
3. Make sure your predictions contain enough "slop" in them that you can more easily do #2.
This has been the stock in trade for psychics and soothsayers for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon#The_Jeane_Dixon_effect
John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, coined the term 'the Jeane Dixon effect', which references a tendency to promote a few correct predictions while ignoring a larger number of incorrect predictions. Many of Dixon's predictions proved erroneous, such as her claims that a dispute over the offshore Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu would trigger the start of World War III in 1958, that American labor leader Walter Reuther would run for President of the United States in the 1964 presidential election, that the second child of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his young wife Margaret would be a girl (it was a boy), and that the Russians would be the first to put men on the moon.
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Demonstrating that someone "is really good at predicting stuff" is not done by rattling off a list of predictions which came true, or which are too vague to have "come true" or not.
Tommy_Carcetti
(43,226 posts)Publish 99.9% unfounded rumors that will never be confirmed.
Have 0.1% of such rumors confirmed (e.g. John Edwards' love child), proclaim themselves to be a reliable source of news.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Yep - THEY WERE RIGHT ABOUT JOHN EDWARDS!!!!
Therefore every piece of crap they publish is true.
Wounded Bear
(58,765 posts)Hell, people are still making money off of the Nostradamus crap, though the real surge has kind of died off.
HopeAgain
(4,407 posts)MineralMan
(146,345 posts)Historic NY
(37,457 posts)check with Nostradamus is still going strong....
https://www.indy100.com/article/us-election-donald-trump-2016-nostradamus-7413801
https://www.indy100.com/article/nostradamus-predictions-2017-astrology-7509551
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)JHB
(37,163 posts)They re-buried him during the French Revolution. No more being the guy at the bottom of the ditch!
mopinko
(70,295 posts)we are hard wired to remember the hits, and forget the misses.