Posts Tagged ‘forecasting’
“Some dreams matter. Most don’t. Often it can be hard to know which might be which.”*…
… So it is with trends and the drivers of fundamental change. One of the canniest spotters of emerging dynamics, Matt Klein, wrestles with some raw material…
I’ve always wanted to play with “conference talk tracks” as a data source, and finally found a moment to do a little analysis.
I took all of the 2025 submitted (not yet accepted) talk titles for SXSW’s “2050” & “Culture” tracks, to identify what patterns exist. I did this via Perplexity AI Pro, an advanced prompt, and detailed profile context.
Note: I don’t necessarily think these talk patterns are “cultural trends,” (although we can debate this). Rather, I see these submitted talk patterns as a pulse on what an industry is finding provocative, discussion-worthy and worth peacocking as thought leadership. That’s a different, valuable sort of insight.
I was particularly interested in surfacing not just the largest common denominators of talks (ex. AI, psychedelics, video games), but instead more specific, smaller and unexpected themes.
What makes SXSW unique (and this data worth analyzing) is that these talk submissions are crowdsourced or “bottoms-up” via industry leaders vs. (biased) invited, brand-focused, or sponsored talks, which many other conferences prioritize. Therefore, I find these SXSW-submissions quite organic and a valuable “pulse” on executive, senior leader, and public thinkers’ minds.
With that, 10 themes from hundreds of talk submissions…
01. Commodification of Authenticity
Can authenticity exist online, let alone from a business? Or is “authenticity” a paradox? This cluster explores how the pursuit of genuine experiences and identities is being packaged, sold, and (likely) diluted in the process, raising questions around the nature of authenticity in a hyper-commercial world.
Ex:
- “Authenticity: The New Social Currency for Brands”
- “Honor Your Root: Building Authentic Brands that Connect”
- “Authenticity + Impact: Native Voices in Film, Food & Beyond”
The other nine at: “10 Patterns from 400+ SXSW ’25 Talk Submissions,” from @KleinKleinKlein.
* Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
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As we sift for significance, we might send lasting birthday greetings to Hazel Bishop; she was born on this date in 1906. An aspiring doctor, she was forced to drop out of medical school during the Great depression, and instead put her undergraduate degree in chemistry to work. As a senior organic chemist with Standard Oil during World War II, she discovered the cause of deposits affecting superchargers of aircraft engines. Later, in 1949, after a long series of home experiments building on that earlier discovery, in a kitchen fitted out as a laboratory, she perfected a “kiss-proof” “No-Smear Lipstick” that stayed on the lips longer than any other product then available, and began its manufacture. Marketed as the lipstick that “stays on you not on him,” it changed the cosmetic industry, spurring a raft on imitators.
“The function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”*…
For as long as there have been markets, there have been those who forecast them. Bob Seawright explains why, for all of that “practice,” forecasting is never– and never can be– a precise nor “perfect” pursuit…
… On our best days, wearing the right sort of spectacles, squinting and tilting our heads just so, we can be observant, efficient, loyal, assertive truth-tellers. However, on most days, all too much of the time, we’re delusional, lazy, partisan, arrogant confabulators. It’s an unfortunate reality, but reality nonetheless.
But that’s hardly the whole story.
We are our own worst enemy, but there are other enemies, too. Despite our best efforts to make it predicable and manageable, and even if we were great forecasters, the world is too immensely complex, chaotic, and chance-ridden for us to do it well…
Eminently worth reading in full for Seawright’s accounts of human nature, complexity, chaos, and chance– and of the ways in which they make confident predictions of the future a “Fool’s Errand.”
As Niels Bohr once said (paraphrasing a Danish proverb), “it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
(Image above: source)
* John Kenneth Galbraith
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As we seek clarity, not certainty, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science” reached #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future”*…
But, as Dylan Matthews reports, some are better at it than others…
The question before a group made up of some of the best forecasters of world events: What are the odds that China will control at least half of Taiwan’s territory by 2030?
Everyone on the chat gives their answer, and in each case it’s a number. Chinmay Ingalagavi, an economics fellow at Yale, says 8 percent. Nuño Sempere, the 25-year-old Spanish independent researcher and consultant leading our session, agrees. Greg Justice, an MBA student at the University of Chicago, pegs it at 17 percent. Lisa Murillo, who holds a PhD in neuroscience, says 15-20 percent. One member of the group, who asked not to be named in this context because they have family in China who could be targeted by the government there, posits the highest figure: 24 percent.
Sempere asks me for my number. Based on a quick analysis of past military clashes between the countries, I came up with 5 percent. That might not seem too far away from the others, but it feels embarrassingly low in this context. Why am I so out of step?
This is a meeting of Samotsvety. The name comes from a 50-year-old Soviet rock band — more on that later — but the modern Samotsvety specializes in predicting the future. And they are very, very good at it. At Infer, a major forecasting platform operated by Rand, the four most accurate forecasters in the site’s history are all members of Samotsvety, and there is a wide gap between them and fifth place. In fact, the gap between them and fifth place is bigger than between fifth and 10th places. They’re waaaaay out ahead.
While Samotsvety members converse on Slack regularly, the Saturday meetings are the heart of the group, and I was sitting in to get a sense of why, exactly, the group was so good. What were these folks doing differently that made them able to see the future when the rest of us can’t?…
The “secrets” of superforecasters: “How a ragtag band of internet friends became the best at forecasting world events,” from @dylanmatt in @voxdotcom.
(Image above: source)
* Niels Bohr
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As we contemplate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1781 that William Herschel discovered Uranus. The first planet to be discovered with the aid of a telescope, he initially thought that it was a comet.
And on this date in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Originally designated the ninth planet, it has been “demoted” to minor (or dwarf) planet status.
“It is difficult to predict, especially the future”*…
An amusing attempt to take the long view…
W. Cade Gall’s delightful “Future Dictates of Fashion” — published in the June 1893 issue of The Strand magazine — is built on the premise that a book from a hundred years in the future (published in 1993) called The Past Dictates of Fashion has been inexplicably found in a library. The piece proceeds to divulge this mysterious book’s contents — namely, a look back at the last century of fashion, which, of course, for the reader in 1893, would be looking forward across the next hundred years. In this imagined future, fashion has become a much respected science (studied in University from the 1950s onwards) and is seen to be “governed by immutable laws”.
The designs themselves have a somewhat unaccountable leaning toward the medieval, or as John Ptak astutely notes, “a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Oz quality”. If indeed this was a genuine attempt by the author Gall to imagine what the future of fashion might look like, it’s fascinating to see how far off the mark he was (excluding perhaps the 60s and 70s), proving yet again how difficult it is to predict future aesthetics. It is also fascinating to see how little Gall imagines clothes changing across the decades (e.g. 1970 doesn’t seem so different to 1920) and to see which aspects of his present he was unable to see beyond (e.g. the long length of women’s skirts and the seemingly ubiquitous frill). As is often the case when we come into contact with historic attempts to predict a future which for us is now past, it is as if glimpsing into another possible world, a parallel universe that could have been (or which, perhaps, did indeed play out “somewhere”)…
More at: “Sartorial Foresight: Future Dictates of Fashion (1893)” in @PublicDomainRev.
Browse the original on the Internet Archive.
* Niels Bohr (after a Danish proverb)
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As we ponder the problem of prognostication, we might recall that it was on this date in 1934 that producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which had been a hit since its publication in 1900 but had until then been considered both inappropriate (as it was a “children’s book”) and too hard to film. Goldwyn was banking on the drawing power of his child star Shirley Temple, the original choice for Dorothy; but (as everyone knows) the role went to Judy Garland who won a special “Best Juvenile Performer” Oscar and made the award-winning song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” a huge hit.
The film was only a modest box-office success on release… but has of course become a beloved classic.
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell on why, on average, we’re better at criticizing others than thinking originally ourselves…
… our individual reasoning processes are biased in ways that are really hard for us (individually) to correct. We have a strong tendency to believe our own bullshit. The upside is that if we are far better at detecting bullshit in others than in ourselves, and if we have some minimal good faith commitment to making good criticisms, and entertaining good criticisms when we get them, we can harness our individual cognitive biases through appropriate group processes to produce socially beneficial ends. Our ability to see the motes in others’ eyes while ignoring the beams in our own can be put to good work, when we criticize others and force them to improve their arguments. There are strong benefits to collective institutions that underpin a cognitive division of labor.
This superficially looks to resemble the ‘overcoming bias’/’not wrong’ approaches to self-improvement that are popular on the Internet. But it ends up going in a very different direction: collective processes of improvement rather than individual efforts to remedy the irremediable. The ideal of the individual seeking to eliminate all sources of bias so that he (it is, usually, a he) can calmly consider everything from a neutral and dispassionate perspective is replaced by a Humean recognition that reason cannot readily be separated from the desires of the reasoner. We need negative criticisms from others, since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, unless they are pointed out to us…
…
… It’s not about a radical individual virtuosity, but a radical individual humility. Your most truthful contributions to collective reasoning are unlikely to be your own individual arguments, but your useful criticisms of others’ rationales. Even more pungently, you are on average best able to contribute to collective understanding through your criticisms of those whose perspectives are most different to your own, and hence very likely those you most strongly disagree with. The very best thing that you may do in your life is create a speck of intense irritation for someone whose views you vigorously dispute, around which a pearl of new intelligence may then accrete…
…
… One of my favourite passages from anywhere is the closing of Middlemarch, where Eliot says of Dorothea:
“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Striving to be a Dorothea is a noble vocation, and likely the best we can hope for in any event; sooner or later, we will all be forgotten. In the long course of time, all of our arguments and ideas will be broken down and decomposed. At best we may hope, if we are very lucky, that they will contribute in some minute way to a rich humus, from which plants that we will never see or understand might spring.
Eminently worth reading in full: “In praise of negativity,” from @henryfarrell.
* Winston Churchill
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As we contemplate the constructive, we might recall that it was on this date in 1871 that a discipline wholly dependent on incorporating corrective critique into its methods was founded: Cleveland Abbe became the founding chief scientist– effectively the head– of the newly formed U.S. Weather Service (later named the Weather Bureau; later still, the National Weather Service).
Abbe had started the first private weather reporting and warning service (in Cincinnati) and had been issuing weather reports or bulletins since 1869 and was the only person in the country at the time who was experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them. The first U.S. meteorologist, he is known as the “father of the U.S. Weather Bureau,” where he systemized observation, trained personnel, and established scientific methods. He went on to become one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society.
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