The original article went too far in the direction of “the future will be like the past”, but you may have overcorrected.
Was it you who said something like “The future will stand in relation to the past as a train smoothly pulling out of a station—and yet prophesy is still difficult.”?
Scavenging the past for preexisting patterns isn’t as sexy as, say, working out scenarios for how the world might end in the future, recursively trying to understand understanding, or prophesying the end of prophesy. Because it’s not as sexy, we may do too little of it.
Trying to understand patterns on a sufficiently deep level for them to be stable, and projecting those patterns forward to arrive at qualitative and rather general predictions not involving e.g. happy fun specific dates, is just what I try to do… which is here dismissed as “the Inside View” and rejected in favor of “that couldn’t possibly happen for the first time”, which is blessed as “the Outside View”.
Trying to understand patterns on a sufficiently deep level for them to be stable, and projecting those patterns forward to arrive at qualitative and rather general predictions not involving e.g. happy fun specific dates, is just what I try to do
The original article went too far in the direction of “the future will be like the past”, but you may have overcorrected.
Was it you who said something like “The future will stand in relation to the past as a train smoothly pulling out of a station—and yet prophesy is still difficult.”?
Scavenging the past for preexisting patterns isn’t as sexy as, say, working out scenarios for how the world might end in the future, recursively trying to understand understanding, or prophesying the end of prophesy. Because it’s not as sexy, we may do too little of it.
Trying to understand patterns on a sufficiently deep level for them to be stable, and projecting those patterns forward to arrive at qualitative and rather general predictions not involving e.g. happy fun specific dates, is just what I try to do… which is here dismissed as “the Inside View” and rejected in favor of “that couldn’t possibly happen for the first time”, which is blessed as “the Outside View”.
Have you had any successes?