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Comment by tjogin | Hacker News Reader

In summary, he nailed it as far as where the the wind is blowing but was wrong on timing; on all accounts except the last one. This is no bad feat as nailing both the direction and timing is nearly impossible.

Compare with, for instance, Bill Gates, who has been claiming that speech recognition as a primary means to control computers is just five years away, for over twenty-five years now.

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Sorry, but there's a saying in investing: "Right but early is wrong. Right but late is wrong."

Any fool can make a very long list of predictions that will all turn out to be correct, even in the stock market, as long as he doesn't have to give them a timeline. Plenty of people saw the housing crash, for example, and plenty of them understood that certain banks were underwater, and regardless of their actions, they were going to go under. However, just knowing that isn't actually worth anything -- a short position carries a heavy premium in interest, and in the famous words of Keynes: "The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

In your 'sayings' early and late are ambiguous. As far as investing is concerned being right in a prediction means you profited, so the early-late error bar is defined by the time in which you could profit by your prediction. Applying this same rationale here the early-late error bar is harder to define, since profit is not clear and somewhat subjective. So taking some liberties with early-late and right-wrong is I feel appropriate.

Taking into consideration that these predictions are 5+ years old I think they are pretty good. He clearly spotted several trends whose future significance was at the time not obvious. If someone started a business believing one of these trends had promise it is possible that the business would have been successful. I do feel that for what he was trying to accomplish being early or late by a couple of years or off on a detail but correct in spirit is not significant.

Also, I think it is important to add that making predictions like these is very important becuase the future develops from our perceptions of what it will be.

Security prices have two basic outcomes: "up" and "down." Usually they fluctuate, so almost any call will "eventually" be proven correct. Sporting events are also mostly binary outcomes, so "the Cubs will reach the World Series" will probably be right if given 200 years.

But with technology predictions, there's an almost infinite set of outcomes, so being right in direction but not timing is significant. For instance, someone who says "Little Rock, Arkansas will win the Super Bowl within 5 years" will look pretty smart even if it takes 6 years for Little Rock to (very unexpectedly) get an NFL franchise and 9 years to reach the Super Bowl.

Granted, technology predictors can use also use some tricks to narrow the possibility space in their favor.

Hey, hey, speech recognition is really here. In fact, I ham dict eating too the come pewter write now.

It's like an automatic mondegreen generator.

I launched Dragon Naturally Speaking and said, "I ham dict eating too the come pewter write now", which it transcribed as "I am dictating to the computer right now."

He nailed it but was wrong on timing? That's like really nailing it on flying cars and the return of the Messiah. Maybe in a few centuries we'll be reaping the benefits of XML databases and salute Steve Yegge's prophetic vision. Come on.

Flying cars are nowhere to be seen, neither is the return of messiah.

The point is that Steve's predictions are actually observable, though some of them are advancing at a slower pace than he thought (and a tiny bit different, like JSON instead of XML, which IMHO is irrelevant).

There are a few people trying [struggling] to make flying cars too!

(but I agree with you :))

They are 'observable' if you bend your critical faculties to a point where small airplanes are flying cars and the Messiah is your favourite politician. Most of Steve's predictions are nonsense. Most predictions are, so it's hardly Steve's fault. But going through great logical contortions to defend some predictions the guy was either brave or foolish enough to commit to paper in 2004? I'll say again, come on.

Small airplanes already existed in 2004, and politician and son-of-god is quite a bit different than XML and JSON which are basically interchangeable serialization formats for the purposes they are both used.

Remind me again what that has to do with the point at hand, please.

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