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Comment by pyrhho | Hacker News Reader

Whenever people drop accolades upon historical figures (Fuller included) I always have to wonder if there is a bit of survivorship bias at play. I'm not saying that Fuller wasn't a complete genius (he definitely was), but I wonder how many other incorrect predictions, and other "geniuses", have been forgotten because they were incorrect.

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How is this a bias? What value would it be to pay attention to all incorrect statements people have made over the years except to understand why they were wrong? People like fuller who had insight that seems to have lasted over time are interesting because we can learn something not just from the statements they made, but from how they thought that gave them insight.

Imagine you have a set of people over history, all thinking in different ways, all making statements about the future. There's a good chance that some of those statements will be true, just by chance. If you don't account for that, you will be biased towards people who just got lucky (the survivors).

I understand the selection principle, but do we realistically think that's what's happening? Are there really lots of people recording detailed, insightful, coherent, highly varied, but wrong theories of the future that we are rejecting? Why would I have to imagine it if it were really going on?

Yes. "detailed, insightful, coherent, highly varied, but wrong theories of the future" are made all the time.

The really amazing things are not the genius predictions that are right and venerated, but the predictions that are wrong but the predictors are still venerated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus - 1798 predictions of "gigantic inevitable famine" because of population growth. (Industrialization and technology have allowed population growth dramatically beyond Malthusian limits. The same arguments are still made today however.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_Marxism - "the socialist revolution would occur first in the most advanced capitalist nations and once collective ownership had been established then all sources of class conflict would disappear" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/ "labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour" (argue about whatever forces you want that have defeated socialism, but the argument continues)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager Malthusian environmentalist Ehrlich predicts hundreds of millions of people starving to death in 1970s and 80s, and a genuine age of scarcity." He also loses 10-year bet against economist Simon. "All of [Ehrlich's] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events...Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker." [Wired]

Recorded, detailed, insightful, coherent, highly varied, completely wrong.

Oh, and Ehrlich won the MacArthur Foundation genius award AFTER his predictions were proven wrong...

Feynman's Grandmother.

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