Hey, when you have the time, read this piece by Dan Gardner. It's about how the press tends to make a big deal when someone makes a prediction and it comes true. But they ignore all the predictions that don't come true.
Back when I was working on That's Incredible!, we were deluged by so-called "psychics" who had made some amazing prediction that such-and-such would happen and it had. Now, I happen to believe that there is no such thing as the psychic power to predict the future…or even the present. There are lucky guesses. There are informed, smart guesses. There are magic tricks where it looks like you're guessing but you're not. But there are no psychic guesses. Someone would write or phone us and say, "I predicted that earthquake!" or "I predicted that celebrity death!" and often, they had. Sometimes, they were lying but sometimes they had.
And when they had predicted the celebrity death, closer inspection would show that they'd gotten one right and ninety-four wrong. Or, for example, there was the lady who wanted major kudos and publicity for predicting that Groucho Marx would die in 1977 — which, indeed, he did. He was 86 and she'd predicted he'd die in 1976 when he was 85 and she'd predicted he'd die in 1975 when he was 84…
Eventually, she had to be right.
Political-type pundits don't usually claim psychic powers and they generally have some good reason to predict what they predict. Still, they're too often celebrated for getting one right out of ten or twenty…or in the case of William Kristol, one of around eighty, and sometimes they predict both ways. Here's an example of that from this very blog…
When it was announced that David Letterman would be retiring, I immediately said, "If I were CBS, I'd send a Dodge Viper filled with cash to Stephen Colbert's door to see if he's ready to abandon his Comedy Central show and the character he plays on it." Then in the very next sentence, I wrote, "But I don't think it'll be Colbert. I think they're going to want someone fresher…"
Ever since he got the job, people congratulate me on predicting it would be Colbert. If it hadn't been, they'd probably congratulate me on predicting it wouldn't be. Sometimes, you just can't be wrong because they won't let you.