Randomness Error

People can be control freaks. They want to know what to expect in the future. TV pundits have jobs for just this reason. Various predictions related to finance, politics, and societal trends fill the airwaves and screen displays because people “just want to know.”

One thing all of these pundits have in common: they are wrong on a regular basis.

A second thing they have in common: when they're right, they will brag incessantly. When someone predicts a future event correctly, they’ll give a nice, big “I-told-ya-so.” When the person is wrong, they’ll lay out numerous excuses and blame someone else. What pundits don’t typically do is face the reality that many of these events are unpredictable, as there are far too many variables to consider, even with computer modeling…and seriously, people have tried modeling pretty much everything on computers.

People make predictions all of the time. Sometimes it’s to make themselves feel better. Other times, it’s an “educated guess.” But educated guesses are still...guesses. Just because someone got it right once (or twice, or three times), does not mean that person will always get it right. If someone could actually predict the future, he/she would like be taken by the government and given a huge chunk of our tax money to work for them.