The benifit of making a correct public prediction vastly outweighs the consequences of making an incorrect prediction.
In normal day to day life, if you make predictions to your friends and they come up wrong consistently, people will remember and they will care less about your opinion. You pay a social price for being wrong.
But the internet changes your predictions in two ways:
– It allows you to keep a public record of your original prediction which makes it easier to predict further in the future.
– It allows you to reach people outside of your social circle with your predictions, removing the social price of being wrong.
If you make a mid to long-term prediction (3 months to a year or longer out), and you’re wrong, you’re prediction will be forgotten by most people. But if you are right, you can revisit and hype the original prediction to showcase your incredible forsight.
You can become “the man who predicted BTC $10,000” and add it to your bio. People will be impressed that you made a correct prediction in the past and forget to ask how many incorrect predictions you made.
In the past, you had to have a big media job to make big public predictions and gain from this public bias, but now anyone can. Since you can start a blog and use social media, you can make big guesses about the future. If they miss, almost no one will notice, but if they hit you will be able to use it for a large social benifit.
Since you have a large benifit from being right and a small cost when wrong, it is almost always “profitable” to make public predictions about the future. So the takeaways are:
- Start making public predictions about big events in the mid to long-term future.
- Stop listening to other peoples predictions, because they are likely full of shit and not accountable for being wrong.
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