Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by realtalk_sp 2254 days ago
Has anyone done an analysis of her past reports to see if she's really any good at prognostication? I feel like in the past she stuck to describing incremental changes and trends but this was much more opinionated.
3 comments

It works OK as a weathervane, but when I see documents full of ellipses, bullet points, truisms and Kissinger quotes I feel like I'm paying to have my confirmation biases validated.

It's not that it's bad or wrong, but there are probably 50 people here at HN who could do an equally good analysis.

I look at these reports as checkpoints of trends that are already happening. All you need is a keen observational eye and some data to back up the qualitative observations to produce something like this.

I don't view these reports are being in the business of predicting the future.

They are describing what's already obviously happening with maybe an optimistic eye towards the future.

Accurately separating what is important from what is trivial in the flow of current events is indistinguishable from predicting the near future.
That's fair. I was more commenting on her Internet Trends Report.
They're generally a good guide to the conventional wisdom from a center-right perspective, but they seldom yield insights.