Re: Almost TIME to Wrap It Up in a Bow!
My_Time,
Here's the deal on making Internet doom and gloom predictions like certain businesses going out of business.
It starts with a theorum of cosmology and astronomy called the Copernican Principle. It basically states, if we generalize it, that we don't occupy a special place in the universe nor do we live during any special time during the life of the universe. In other words, the universe wasn't specifically arranged so that we could be living at a particular time and place to view some special set of events. Admittedly, that's a pretty wide generalization of the principle because it really said that the Earth isn't the center of a universe that evolves around it.
The generalizarion has been taken to include systems other than those on cosmic scales. In that smaller scale generalization it states that if you randomly observe any system, like a particular building or say a business you have a very high probability, approaching unity, of observing the system during the middle 50% of it's total lifetime. You randomly observe the system at some time between the point where it is 25% to 75% evolved toward it's disappearance from being observable.
The principle also assumes that you don't have to know any information about how the system works or the causes that result in its end of life. The end could be planned by people that you have no contact with, it could burn down, be destroyed by aliens with phasers...anything.
So let's look at a couple of specifics:
Peak Oil. We've been drilling for oil for about 100 years. We don't know a thing about the oil industry. But we can say this:
At one extreme we're observing the 100 year old industry when it is only 25% "old". At the other extreme we're observing the industry when it's 75% "old". The remaing life of the oil industry is expected to be 33 yrs to 300 yrs.
GM: General Motors was founded exactly 100 years ago in 1908. See above for making a prediction.
33 yrs - 300 yrs.
"Some other company": This company is 25 years old. Apply the above and you have a life expectancy of 8 yrs to 75 yrs.
Now, shotgun dozens of predictions on multiple sites claiming doom and gloom destruction for specific businesses, people, things, countries, etc. Keep the exact date of the end of life absent. Just say, "I see in the future the destruction of..."
You will get some correct predictions. Why? Because when you work out the numbers for specific businesses and you see the long extreme of 100, 200 or 300 more years of life for the business you know that that's not likely. There's but a few dozen 200 year old businesses in the world among the many millions of businesses that have existed during the past two centuries. You know that you're very unlikely in the real world to be 100 to 300 years from the end of the business' life. The near extreme is much more likely.
What are the chances of getting at least one correct?
Let's say that you make three predictions. Each prediction only has a 50% chance of being correct.
Put it another way: you form a sniper team. Snipers only get one shot per target. But the talent pool is pretty bad. Your individual snipers only have a 50% of hitting a specific target. So you deploy three person sniper teams per event.
You now have a hostage situation. You deploy a team. When the weapons free signal comes down each sniper simultaneously fires at the target. Do they have a good chance of taking the target down?
The first sniper's probability covers 50% of the "hit" column. The second sniper's 50% covers 50% of the portion not covered by the first sniper. You're at 75%. The third sniper covers 50% of the remaining 25%...12.5%.
So, what is the probability of one of your snipers taking the target down: 87.5%.
What is the chance of getting at least one prediction right if you make three but only have a coin-flip 50-50 chance on each prediction? Same as the snipers - 87.5%. Not bad for a coin flip situation.
You gloat over the hit and ignore any references to the two misses (unless you're the sniper team and one or more of the misses actually hit the hostage. Kinda hard to ignore that, eh what?
Now go back to the shotgun approach of putting out dozen of such predictions on multiple sites. You'll get a few "right" eventually. Ignore the misses and gloat about the hits...even if the exact cause of the hit isn't what you predicted (who's going to quibble about the details anywyay /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif )
