Temporal Dissonance
What is the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a super-forecaster?
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The Year of Our Lord 2023 has begun, and as with all new years a slew of commentators have put forth their predictions. Predictions are, historically, in the realm of magic and sorcery. However, as with many things in modernity, Science has changed that. Now we have people called ‘superforecasters’.
While I was reading yet another list of predictions, a thought struck me: what exactly is the difference between a conspiracy theory and a prediction? The answer, I realised, is time. Not whether or not a theory is proved in time, but the fact that one is about the future and one is about the present and/or past. This factor is what determines the relative status towards forecasters and conspiracists. Consider the following:
Forecaster: You make a prediction and it is proved correct (at least in part) and your status goes up. If you make an incorrect prediction and it does not pan out, then your status remains similar (unless people other than you put investment into said prediction, but let’s imagine these without any skin in the game).
Conspiracist: You make a prediction and it is proved correct (at least in part) and your status does not increase (nobody in the mainstream wants you to be right or will ignore you). If you make an incorrect prediction your status will be lowered still further, “crank” label confirmed.
This does get a little messy if you consider betting markets and the polling industry for forecasters, and the isolationist ‘bubble’ factor of conspiracy communities. Each has their true believers that tip the scales. Overall it could be said that forecasting is a high status activity because you are using Science (statistics, polls, past facts) to guess at a future. A conspiracy, however, is trying to ‘retell’ the past. It’s trying to ‘change the facts’ as it were. Forecasting is OK because the facts are not set in stone, not yet, whereas a conspiracy is telling people that they are wrong about something long believed to be true.
Fundamentally though both are the same activity with different time preferences.
When you consider the similarity of the process, you start to question how we determine status. When it comes down to it, science is more in the realm of conspiracy theorists, not forecasters. Most breakthroughs have been through challenging orthodoxy, not through imagining a future. This might be why ‘disruptive science’ is on the decline, because that we have lowered the status of conspiracists and and put value on a safe future. No one is willing to challenge and disrupt, but would rather to stick to known formulas to push the future gently. True innovators look to the past way of doing things and want to reimagine it.
Given that so many so-called conspiracies have turned out to be true in the last few years, notably anything to do with Twitter, perhaps 2023 can be the year that the theorist status is increased. It is unfortunate that Big Foot believers are lumped in with government surveillance types, but then again, UFOs are probably real, to some degree or another. Time is the greatest arbiter of truth, after all.