But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

The library in my sixth-grade classroom contained many books that no one ever touched. It did, however, include one book that my entire class touched compulsively: The Book of Lists. Published in 1977, The Book of Lists was exactly what it purported to be—521 pages of lists, presented by The People’s Almanac and compiled by three writers (David Wallechinsky, his sister Amy, and their father Irving). This was a book you didn’t really read, per se; you just thumbed through it at random and tried to memorize information that was both deliberately salacious and generally unencumbered by the fact-checking process (I still recall the book’s list of famous homosexuals, which included only three rock musicians—Janis Joplin, Elton John, and David Bowie, the last of whom was married to the same woman for more than twenty years). Sequels to the book were released in 1980 and 1983. What I did not realize, however, was that the creators of The Book of Lists also published a similar work titled The Book of Predictions, in 1980. (I stumbled across it in the late nineties, in the living room of a friend who liked to buy bizarre out-of-print books to peruse while stoned.) Like its more famous predecessor, The Book of Predictions describes itself: It’s several hundred pages of futurists and scientists (and—somewhat distractingly—psychics) making unsystematic predictions about life on Earth in the coming fifty years.

On those rare occasions when The Book of Predictions is referenced today, the angle is inevitably mocking: The most eye-catching predictions are always the idiotic ones. As it turns out, there has not been a murder in outer space committed by a jealous astronaut, which is what lawyer F. Lee Bailey predicted would occur in 1990 (and evidently struck Bailey as more plausible than the possibility of defending a jealous Hall of Fame running back for an earthbound murder in 1994). According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter. Yet some of the book’s predictions are the opposite of terrible: Several speculators accurately estimated the world population in 2010 would be around seven billion. A handful of technology experts made remarkably realistic projections about an imminent international computer network. Charlie Gillett, a British musicologist best known for writing the first comprehensive history of rock music (1970’s The Sound of the City), somehow managed to outline the fall of the music industry in detail without any possible knowledge of MP3s or file sharing.3 Considering how difficult it is to predict what will still be true a year from now, any level of accuracy on a fifty-year guess feels like a win.

Yet what is most instructive about The Book of Predictions is not the things that proved true. It’s the bad calculations that must have seemed totally justifiable—perhaps even conservative—at the time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary. The Book of Predictions was released in 1980, so this mostly means a failure to imagine a world where the United States and the Soviet Union were not on the cusp of war. Virtually every thought about the future of global politics focuses on either (a) an impending nuclear collision between the two nations, or (b) a terrifying alliance between the USSR and China. As far as I can tell, no one in the entire Book of Predictions assumed the friction between the US and Russia could be resolved without the detonation of nuclear weapons. A similar problem is witnessed whenever anyone from 1980 attempts to consider the future of interpersonal communication: Even though widespread cell phone use was right around the corner—there was already a mobile phone network in Japan in ’79—it was almost impossible to think this would ever replace traditional landlines for average people. All speculation regarding human interaction is limited by the assumption that landline telephones would always be the best way to communicate. On page 29, there are even escalating predictions about the annual number of long-distance calls that would be made in the US, a problem that’s irrelevant in the age of free calling. Yet as recently as twenty years ago, this question still mattered; as a college student in the early nineties, I knew of several long-term romantic relationships that were severed simply because the involved parties attended different schools and could not afford to make long-distance calls, even once a week. In 1994, the idea of a sixty-minute phone call from Michigan to Texas costing less than mailing a physical letter the same distance was still unimaginable. Which is why no one imagined it in 1980, either.

This brand of retrospective insight presents a rather obvious problem: My argument requires a “successful” futurist to anticipate whatever it is that can’t possibly be anticipated. It’s akin to demanding someone be spontaneous on command. But there’s still a practical lesson here, or at least a practical thought: Even if we can’t foresee the unforeseeable, it’s possible to project a future reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to what actually happens. It feels awkward to think like this, because such thinking accepts irrationality. Of course, irrational trajectories happen all the time. Here’s an excerpt from a 1948 issue of Science Digest: “Landing and moving around the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.” That prediction was off by only 179 years. But the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not technological; it was motivational. In 1948, traveling to the moon was a scientific aspiration; the desire for a lunar landing was analogous to the desire to climb a previously unscaled mountain. Science Digest assumed this goal would be pursued in the traditional manner of scientific inquiry—a grinding process of formulating theories and testing hypotheses. But when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed. Terrified Americans suddenly imagined Khrushchev launching weapons from the lunar surface. The national desire to reach the moon first was now a military concern (with a sociocultural subtext over which country was intellectually and morally superior). That accelerated the process dramatically. By the summer of ’69, we were planting flags and collecting moon rocks and generating an entirely new class of conspiracy theorists. So it’s not that the 1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; it’s that logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future.

Any time you talk to police (or lawyers, or journalists) about any kind of inherently unsolvable mystery, you will inevitably find yourself confronted with the concept of Occam’s Razor: the philosophical argument that the best hypothesis is the one involving the lowest number of assumptions. If (for example) you’re debating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Occam’s Razor supports the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone—it’s the simplest, cleanest conclusion, involving the least number of unverifiable connections. With Occam’s Razor is how a serious person considers the past. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work for the future. When you’re gazing into the haze of a distant tomorrow, everything is an assumption. Granted, some of those competing assumptions seem (or maybe feel) more reasonable than others. But we live in a starkly unreasonable world. The history of ideas is littered with more failures than successes. Retroactively, we all concede this. So in order to move forward, we’re forced to use a very different mind-set. For lack of a better term, we’ll just have to call it Klosterman’s Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.