Like many blogs the Institute for the Future's Future Now does "links posts", short lists of pointers to other pages worth noting but not commenting about. A recent one was to a short essay by Hari Kunzru, Futurecasting, from a few years ago.

I remembered having posted about it a couple of years ago, so I read my own old post. That post was critical of the failures of "the old hippies" at GBN and the whole concept of scenarios as useful planning tools - the Art of Long View and the whole Peter Schwartz "remarkable people" concept. Instead it spoke of a “Science of the Long View” which elevated futurism above pure speculation by adding a requirement that scenarios and models be testable.

It's worth noting now that Kunzru also faulted Schwartz for sliding over to the dark side.

. . . in writing The Long Boom, Peter Schwartz has crossed the line from disinterested futurism to political advocacy, in the process breaking the cardinal rule of a scenario planning session - that there should always be a set of alternatives. The Long Boom contains a single well-developed scenario, and a call to make it come true. . .

As New Economy ideas take hold, a subtle oscillation between prediction and control is being engineered. The consensus is that virtual futures generate capital, which is to say that successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an increasing ability to draw us towards them, to command us to make them flesh. Early twentieth-century avant-gardists revolted in the name of the future against a power-structure which relied on control and representation of the past. Today the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists, and draw power from the futures they endorse, condemning the disempowered to live in the past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow. . .

But it will take more than a market downturn to kill futurism. The dream of a predictable, controllable tomorrow, a tomorrow which can be created, or at least planned-for, is still tantalisingly present on the horizon.

It's that old time religion tarted up in Jetson's togs. But like religion the fantasy conflicts with reality. Society can be distorted by visions, drawn toward a future state, but it all collapses when the strain eventually becomes great. Some can profit in the near term but it's just a speculative bubble that will burst in due course.

What struck me in reviewing these old essays and posts is that they are relevant to more recent ones. The notion discussed in Narratives and Grimmer Than Thou that media failures can be somewhat explained if not improved, and that speculation in the media by the evil twins boomsters and doomsters is merely entertainment, was echoed in another essay referenced in that old post.

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

So one problem with speculation is that it piggybacks on the Gell-Mann effect of unwarranted credibility, making the speculation look more useful than it is.

Another issue concerns the sheer volume of speculation. Sheer volume comes to imply a value which is specious. I call this the There-Must-Be-A-Pony effect, from the old joke in which a kid comes down Christmas morning, finds the room filled with horseshit, and claps his hands with delight. His astonished parents ask: why are you so happy? He says, with this much horseshit, there must be a pony.

Where there is smoke there is bound to be a fire and where there is horseshit there must be a pony? It is this sort of credulity that is exploited by media, futurists, politicians, hustlers and grifters of every sort. My advice is to practice the art of sales resistance even more than you practice the art or science of the long view.