Some possible sources of examples, many I haven’t checked and many lacking precise details:
CFCs?
Asteroid tracking (if they weren’t planning on asteroids in the next ten years, seems like natural risks with average return periods > 10 years could be a good source of examples, though I feel this maybe isn’t what you are asking for because it is so statistical rather than scenario-based)
Legislation where you don’t expect the legislation to have effects for more than 10 years. Some international treaties/conventions might be examples
Religion examples. In 1833 William Miller predicted the return of Jesus Christ in 1843 and people took specific actions. [Edited: original date written was 1943, which was a typo]
Space exploration examples? Maybe these things required far advance planning. Voyager may be an example?
Sleeper agents? I have heard stories that some Russian agents were sleepers in the US for greater than 10 years, waiting to strike at the right time if war broke out. May want to check on it.
Eugenics people
People conducting very long longitudinal studies
There are some mundane examples that fit your description but I don’t think are what you are asking for. E.g., people working on buildings that take more than 10 years to complete, people buying something for a young daughter and saving it for when she gets married (I guess this used to be a thing), people getting mortgages, people saving for retirement, people studying anatomy when 16 in hopes of becoming a doctor, making a trust fund for your kid.
Lots of organizations have truly ambitious plans. Medtronic, Inc., the largest medical technology company in the world, was founded with a 100-year plan. The founder of Panasonic had an even longer term plan. The city government of Amarillo, TX is preparing a 20-year road map. The city government of North Vancouver has adopted a 100 Year Sustainability Vision for the City.
You mean, that it would end some time after they were already dead? Well, I remember speaking with a family of creationists who were moderately confident (no man may know the hour) that the ressurrection would end up being the midpoint of time, with the >1000 years of the Tribulation included in that figure, so we could expect that to begin in around 500 years.
Thanks Nick. I didn’t give enough detail as to what I’m looking for in my original post. My initial reactions
CFCs?
Yes, Luke and I talked about this — I forgot to list it.
Asteroid tracking (if they weren’t planning on asteroids in the next ten years, seems like natural risks with average return periods > 10 years could be a good source of examples, though I feel this maybe isn’t what you are asking for because it is so statistical rather than scenario-based)
I think that I’m looking for things involving more speculation. Also, we don’t know what the impact of asteroid tracking effots will be.
Legislation where you don’t expect the legislation to have effects for more than 10 years. Some international treaties/conventions might be examples
Here there’s a clear historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making.
Religion examples. In 1833 William Miller predicted the return of Jesus Christ in 1943 and people took specific actions.
How many people?
Space exploration examples? Maybe these things required far advance planning. Voyager may be an example?
I’ll brood on this. Intuitively, it doesn’t seem relevant, but I have trouble placing my finger on why.
Futures markets? How far do they go out?
I’ll investigate.
Simon-Ehrlich wager
I’m looking at this as a part of the Limits to Growth investigation.
Sleeper agents? I have heard stories that some Russian agents were sleepers in the US for greater than 10 years, waiting to strike at the right time if war broke out. May want to check on it.
I’ll investigate.
Eugenics people
Did they have any impact? Could they plausibly have?
People conducting very long longitudinal studies
These seem like they fall into the category “general scientific research that could have humanitarian value” rather than being driven by specific predictions and being aimed at influencing specific outcomes.
There are some mundane examples that fit your description but I don’t think are what you are asking for. E.g., people working on buildings that take more than 10 years to complete, people buying something for a young daughter and saving it for when she gets married (I guess this used to be a thing), people getting mortgages, people saving for retirement, people studying anatomy when 16 in hopes of becoming a doctor, making a trust fund for your kid.
Here there’s a clear historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making.
I recall happening upon an ancient book on biology in a library, and glancing at what someone in the field thought about eugenics a hundred years ago. The author was as racist as one would expect for his time, but he considered eugenics an absolute waste of time on the basis that actually having a significant impact would require interventions on a vastly larger scale than anybody was really imagining; in practice, he thought it obvious that any deliberate selection effects would be miniscule and completely swamped by the ongoing effects of normal human mate selection practices. I don’t know if his view was widespread, but it does seem to be true of eugenics on the scale it was usually discussed or attempted by anyone except the Nazis, and something that at least some people had figured out even before eugenics went out of favor for other reasons.
Interesting point, although it has the problem that we haven’t actually observed eugenics being useless because of the vast scale of intervention required. (Since the Nazis were stopped, and the other reasons for eugenics not working—e.g., having become a dirty word—could well explain its apparent uselessness even if the “vast scale” was not a problem.)
Your “as one would expect” comment reminded me of something obvious that doesn’t seem to be mentioned. One of the thing SF does is try to anticipate the future. I’ve read last year some rather old SF (early Harlan Ellison and the like), and the contrast between what “sounds weird” now and didn’t then, and vice-versa, suggests that we could “extract predictions” from such stories.
The example that came to mind was that the “weird future thing” in one of the stories (which, incidentally, I think was set around now) was that “in the future” only women were doing some cool job (I think piloting), almost never men, because women were better at it. The claim would sound normal now, but was probably a daring prediction for the time.
So, the trick for finding good predictions would be to read old SF, notice things that you wouldn’t notice around you, but that would be daringly avant-garde at the time. (For failed predictions, look for things that still sound weird.)
Although, of course, 90% of everything is mostly crap, including SF, even the good SF isn’t always applicable, and that “historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making” part is harder. I heard (within the last decade or so) of some part of the US government explicitly asking for predictions from SF writers, but I doubt that would have happened much fifty years ago, much less actually taking the advice.
Not Heinlein’s best moment, forecasting-wise. That males have better visuospatial skills and faster reaction times are stalwarts of the gender differences literature.
True, though… do you really think that was an actual forecast in any meaningful way? I mean, other than “the future will be different, and women are better than men at other things than housekeeping”.
Well, even if it’s not a forecast, it’s still not a great example because anyone familiar with the facts (the reaction time literature and gender differences go back to the 1800s, for example) will dismiss it annoyedly (‘no, that’s not how it works. Also, explosions in space don’t produce any sound!’)
Still, flying was sufficiently new that most people wouldn’t probably be justified in reaching very high confidence about what abilities are needed and in what combination, especially for future aircraft, just by knowing all the literature existing up to then. (Also, if you live in a world where women almost never are trained and then work for years at some task X, it’s more or less impossible to compare (with statistical significance) how good experienced men and women are at X, because it would take years to obtain female candidates.)
Now that I think of it, that too. But I’m pretty sure it was something/someone else. Strange that two authors would use that particular speculation, in what I think were very different kinds of stories.
Religion examples. In 1833 William Miller predicted the return of Jesus Christ in 1943 and people took specific actions.
How many people?
I couldn’t find the answer on the Wikipedia page, but it sounds like it was a big deal. One data point is this (from the Wikipedia page):
As the various dates of Christ’s predicted return approached, Millerite publishing went into high gear. In May 1843, 21,000 copies of the various Millerite papers were published for distribution each week. In New York alone, in the five-month period ending April 1843, 600,000 copies of various publications were distributed. In December 1843, Himes proposed the publication of one million tracts, while in May 1844, he announced that five million copies of Millerite publications had been distributed up to that time.[11]
Another is that Miller spawned the Seventh-Day Adventists who have approximately 17M members today.
Eugenics people
Did they have any impact? Could they plausibly have?
They certainly thought they could have a big impact. There was no precedent of them having the impact they wanted. And it was a major movement. I have no sense of how feasible their strategies should have looked at the time.
Some possible sources of examples, many I haven’t checked and many lacking precise details:
CFCs?
Asteroid tracking (if they weren’t planning on asteroids in the next ten years, seems like natural risks with average return periods > 10 years could be a good source of examples, though I feel this maybe isn’t what you are asking for because it is so statistical rather than scenario-based)
Legislation where you don’t expect the legislation to have effects for more than 10 years. Some international treaties/conventions might be examples
Religion examples. In 1833 William Miller predicted the return of Jesus Christ in 1843 and people took specific actions. [Edited: original date written was 1943, which was a typo]
Space exploration examples? Maybe these things required far advance planning. Voyager may be an example?
Futures markets? How far do they go out?
Simon-Ehrlich wager
Sleeper agents? I have heard stories that some Russian agents were sleepers in the US for greater than 10 years, waiting to strike at the right time if war broke out. May want to check on it.
Eugenics people
People conducting very long longitudinal studies
There are some mundane examples that fit your description but I don’t think are what you are asking for. E.g., people working on buildings that take more than 10 years to complete, people buying something for a young daughter and saving it for when she gets married (I guess this used to be a thing), people getting mortgages, people saving for retirement, people studying anatomy when 16 in hopes of becoming a doctor, making a trust fund for your kid.
From Leverage Research’s website:
Great.
Miller predicted the return of Jesus in 21 years, not a century. (Added: I don’t mean to imply that this makes him uninteresting.)
I would be very interested to learn if anyone has ever predicted the supernatural end of the world on that time scale.
You mean, that it would end some time after they were already dead? Well, I remember speaking with a family of creationists who were moderately confident (no man may know the hour) that the ressurrection would end up being the midpoint of time, with the >1000 years of the Tribulation included in that figure, so we could expect that to begin in around 500 years.
Fixed. Thanks for catching it.
Thanks Nick. I didn’t give enough detail as to what I’m looking for in my original post. My initial reactions
Yes, Luke and I talked about this — I forgot to list it.
I think that I’m looking for things involving more speculation. Also, we don’t know what the impact of asteroid tracking effots will be.
Here there’s a clear historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making.
How many people?
I’ll brood on this. Intuitively, it doesn’t seem relevant, but I have trouble placing my finger on why.
I’ll investigate.
I’m looking at this as a part of the Limits to Growth investigation.
I’ll investigate.
Did they have any impact? Could they plausibly have?
These seem like they fall into the category “general scientific research that could have humanitarian value” rather than being driven by specific predictions and being aimed at influencing specific outcomes.
Here there’s a clear historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making.
I recall happening upon an ancient book on biology in a library, and glancing at what someone in the field thought about eugenics a hundred years ago. The author was as racist as one would expect for his time, but he considered eugenics an absolute waste of time on the basis that actually having a significant impact would require interventions on a vastly larger scale than anybody was really imagining; in practice, he thought it obvious that any deliberate selection effects would be miniscule and completely swamped by the ongoing effects of normal human mate selection practices. I don’t know if his view was widespread, but it does seem to be true of eugenics on the scale it was usually discussed or attempted by anyone except the Nazis, and something that at least some people had figured out even before eugenics went out of favor for other reasons.
Interesting point, although it has the problem that we haven’t actually observed eugenics being useless because of the vast scale of intervention required. (Since the Nazis were stopped, and the other reasons for eugenics not working—e.g., having become a dirty word—could well explain its apparent uselessness even if the “vast scale” was not a problem.)
Your “as one would expect” comment reminded me of something obvious that doesn’t seem to be mentioned. One of the thing SF does is try to anticipate the future. I’ve read last year some rather old SF (early Harlan Ellison and the like), and the contrast between what “sounds weird” now and didn’t then, and vice-versa, suggests that we could “extract predictions” from such stories.
The example that came to mind was that the “weird future thing” in one of the stories (which, incidentally, I think was set around now) was that “in the future” only women were doing some cool job (I think piloting), almost never men, because women were better at it. The claim would sound normal now, but was probably a daring prediction for the time.
So, the trick for finding good predictions would be to read old SF, notice things that you wouldn’t notice around you, but that would be daringly avant-garde at the time. (For failed predictions, look for things that still sound weird.)
Although, of course, 90% of everything is mostly crap, including SF, even the good SF isn’t always applicable, and that “historical precedent that people are using to inform their decision making” part is harder. I heard (within the last decade or so) of some part of the US government explicitly asking for predictions from SF writers, but I doubt that would have happened much fifty years ago, much less actually taking the advice.
In Starship Troopers, women were the pilots—iirc, because of better reflexes.
Not Heinlein’s best moment, forecasting-wise. That males have better visuospatial skills and faster reaction times are stalwarts of the gender differences literature.
True, though… do you really think that was an actual forecast in any meaningful way? I mean, other than “the future will be different, and women are better than men at other things than housekeeping”.
Well, even if it’s not a forecast, it’s still not a great example because anyone familiar with the facts (the reaction time literature and gender differences go back to the 1800s, for example) will dismiss it annoyedly (‘no, that’s not how it works. Also, explosions in space don’t produce any sound!’)
Still, flying was sufficiently new that most people wouldn’t probably be justified in reaching very high confidence about what abilities are needed and in what combination, especially for future aircraft, just by knowing all the literature existing up to then. (Also, if you live in a world where women almost never are trained and then work for years at some task X, it’s more or less impossible to compare (with statistical significance) how good experienced men and women are at X, because it would take years to obtain female candidates.)
Now that I think of it, that too. But I’m pretty sure it was something/someone else. Strange that two authors would use that particular speculation, in what I think were very different kinds of stories.
I couldn’t find the answer on the Wikipedia page, but it sounds like it was a big deal. One data point is this (from the Wikipedia page):
Another is that Miller spawned the Seventh-Day Adventists who have approximately 17M members today.
They certainly thought they could have a big impact. There was no precedent of them having the impact they wanted. And it was a major movement. I have no sense of how feasible their strategies should have looked at the time.