PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

1. SCIENCE AND FORETELLING
fear of death. Unlike religion, however, the goal is neither salvation nor
internal peace. Most often the desire to know the future focuses on material
or personal gains. People may not openly admit it, but the ability
to foretell the future means acquiring power, becoming superhuman.
Scientists normally disdain the notion that they, too, are in the business
of fortune-telling, which is curious because science itself revolves
around methodologies for telling the future. Scientists merely use a different
vocabulary. In contrast to fortune-tellers, they talk about
calculations instead of predictions, laws instead of fate, and statistical
fluctuations instead of accidents. Yet the aim of the scientific method is
the same. From the observation of past events, scientists derive laws
that, when verified, enable them to predict future outcomes.
This is not to diminish the value of science. On the contrary, considering
its impressive success, I want to emulate it. The desire to involve
science in foretelling the future is not new. Science carries authority and
respect. The word scientific is used as a synonym for proven. Various
disciplines seek to be classified among the sciences to raise their status.
We have social science, behavioral science, computer science, environmental
science, management science, decision science, marketing
science, organization science, administration science. Before long we
may see business science, sports science, or love science. It sometimes
seems, in fact, that having science as a surname may be an indication of
being poorly endowed by it.
Weather forecasting has called on the hard sciences repeatedly over
the years. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the advent of digital computers
and space satellites made global weather forecasting a promising
candidate as a new “science.” The twenty years that followed saw vast
and expensive bureaucracies built up around weather forecasting centers
on both sides of the Atlantic. Equipped with the most powerful computers,
these places attracted resources and talent in the name of longrange
weather prediction. Yet complicated models involving the solution
of multiple equations and handling large amounts of data produced
forecasts that were useful for only a few days. Thousands of talentedman
years and billions of dollars later, James Gleick concluded in his
book Chaos that “long-range weather forecasting is doomed.” 1
Economic forecasting masquerading as a “science” also involved
elaborate econometric models with complicated and sometimes arbitrary
equations aiming to predict future trends from variables such as
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