http://bactra.org/notebooks Cosma's Notebooks en http://bactra.org/notebooks/2003/01/19#prophecy <blockquote>Amongst all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitious. <br>---George Eliot, <citE>Middlemarch,</cite> bk. I, ch. 10</blockquote> A.k.a. futurology. Bunk, of course --- see <a href="popper.html">Popper</a> --- 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.) <ul>See: <li>J. D. Bernal, <cite><a href="../Bernal/">The World, the Flesh and the Devil</a></cite> (1929) <li>Freeman Dyson <ul> <li><cite>Infinite in All Directions</cite> <li><cite>Imagined Worlds</cite> [I've written a review --- <a href="../reviews/imagined-worlds/">Uncle Freeman's Stories</a> --- on why I don't take even Dyson at all seriously] </ul> <li>J. B. S. Haldane, <cite><a href="../Daedalus.html">Daedalus, or Science and the Future</a></cite> (1923) <li>Karl <a href="popper.html">Popper</a>, <cite>The Poverty of Historicism</cite> <li>Bertrand <a href="bertrand-russell.html">Russell</a>, <cite><a href="../Icarus.html">Icarus, or the Future of Science</a></cite> (1924) <li>Bruce Sterling, <cite>Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years</cite> (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 <em>underappreciated bits of the present.</em>] </ul> <ul>To read: <li>B. de Jouvenal, <cite>Art of Conjecture</cite> <li>Max Dublin, <cite>Futurehype</cite> [It appears Mr. Dublin only objects to <em>optimistic</em> futurologists, as he takes <a href="rifkin.html">Jeremy Rifkin</a>'s nonsense about entropy as gospel.] <li>Nicholas Rescher, <cite>Predicting the Future</cite> <li>William Sherden, <cite>The Fortune Sellers</cite> </ul>