Prophecy

19 Jan 2003 12:57

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Amongst all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitious.
---George Eliot, Middlemarch, bk. I, ch. 10

A.k.a. futurology. Bunk, of course --- see Popper --- but there's a damn lot of it, and I know of at least one case where it has served a useful function. (Namely, the efforts of J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, and J. D. Bernal inspired much good science fiction, as have the more recent efforts of their self-conscious successor Freeman Dyson.)

See:
• J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929)
• Freeman Dyson
  • Infinite in All Directions
  • Imagined Worlds [I've written a review --- Uncle Freeman's Stories --- on why I don't take even Dyson at all seriously]
• J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923)
• Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
• Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924)
• Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002) [Futurology by an excellent science fiction writer, fully conscious of the fact that it's going to look bizarrely wrong in much less than fifty years. Very good as a tour of underappreciated bits of the present.]

To read:
• B. de Jouvenal, Art of Conjecture
• Max Dublin, Futurehype [It appears Mr. Dublin only objects to optimistic futurologists, as he takes Jeremy Rifkin's nonsense about entropy as gospel.]
• Nicholas Rescher, Predicting the Future
• William Sherden, The Fortune Sellers