Our friend Max Zeledon, likely annoyed by tweets from SXSW, grew sharp tonight. "I'm increasingly becoming bored with tech pundits," he wrote, "who continue to overreach when it comes to the future, pretending to know what the next 'big' thing is when in fact nobody can predict the future." We reflected:
We're all guilty of this to a degree. Since we all write or speak differently, perhaps it comes down to motive. Some (I like to think myself) write about future trends because we're curious, we're challenged, we're puzzled, we have questions and we're trying to sort it all out. Others may do so for more purely self-promotional motives, riding the Gartner hype cycle to draw attention to their speaking or book deals. The problem is there is huge demand for this type of bullshit. Humans, business people in particular, are exposed to massive amounts of data and have a hard time ingesting it; we long for frameworks to help us understand the world; when someone gives us a new model to screen the noise of data coming in from the future, we latch on. It could be a survival instinct, a weather forecast for winter storms ahead, but there's deep hunger for future predictions. The demand may come from fear we'll fail, or hope we'll win, so we buy into Who Moved My Cheese silliness to guide our next decision. I hope I'm not the guy feeding this to make money or to build a modicum of fame. I hope I just write because I'm trying to solve the puzzle in my own head. But thanks for the warning.
2 comments:
Ben - Have you read "Expert Political Judgment" by Philip Tetlock. He basically spent 20 years tracking social, political and economic predictions made by pundits.
The findings are very interesting.
Matt, thanks, I will check it out.
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