Prognostication Quotes

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand because it is much better to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

In acute diseases it is not quite safe to prognosticate either death or recovery.

Persons in whom a crisis takes place pass the night preceding the paroxysm uncomfortably, but the succeeding night generally more comfortably.

It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the future; the far-seeing are also the foolish.

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art, As truth and beauty shall together thrive If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert; Or else of thee I prognosticate, Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.

The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: "So soon?" E. B. White "On A Florida Key

The future is as blank as a plane sheet if you don't have an eagle's eye, that's why you should climb to a vantage point to get a good perspective view at your future.

Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you've acquired to connect with them. Take them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can. Online, there are hundreds of individuals distilling information, analyzing it, and making prognos-tications. These armchair analysts are the eyes and ears of innovation. Now get online and read, read, read. Subscribe to magazines, buy books, and talk to the smartest people you can find. Eventually, all this knowledge will build on itself, and you'll start making connections others aren't.

By 1975 sexual feeling and marriage will have nothing to do with each other.

A brick could be used to foretell the future. Here’s my prediction: Tomorrow will happen. If I’m right, the brick was correct, and if I’m wrong, we’ll all be dead and my prognostication record remains unblemished.


I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything." "You don't want to do anything?" "I want to sleep." -Gloria Gilbert "Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: "'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. "'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.' "So the men did, and they died. "But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible." -Maury Noble

Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.

Europe shall be the head, Asia the crown, but Africa shall be the jewel. "Another Prognostication by Theophrastus Paracelsus

The history of Immanuel Kant's life is difficult to portray, for he had neither life nor history. He led a mechanical, regular, almost abstract bachelor existence in a little retired street of Königsberg, an old town on the north-eastern frontier of Germany. I do not believe that the great clock of the cathedral performed in a more passionless and methodical manner its daily routine than did its townsman, Immanuel Kant. Rising in the morning, coffee-drinking, writing, reading lectures, dining, walking, everything had its appointed time, and the neighbors knew that it was exactly half-past three o'clock when Kant stepped forth from his house in his grey, tight-fitting coat, with his Spanish cane in his hand, and betook himself to the little linden avenue called after him to this day the "Philosopher's Walk." Summer and winter he walked up and down it eight times, and when the weather was dull or heavy clouds prognosticated rain, the townspeople beheld his servant, the old Lampe, trudging anxiously behind Kant with a big umbrella under his arm, like an image of Providence. What a strange contrast did this man's outward life present to his destructive, world-annihilating thoughts! In sooth, had the citizens of Königsberg had the least presentiment of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt far more awful dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, who can but kill the body. But the worthy folk saw in him nothing more than a Professor of Philosophy, and as he passed at his customary hour, they greeted him in a friendly manner and set their watches by him.

A true saying it is, ‘Desire hath no rest;‘ is infinite in itself, endless; and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill, according to Austin, still going round as in a ring.

Our world is in turmoil. It is aging toward senility. It is very ill. Long ago it was born with brilliant prospects. It was baptized by water, and its sins were washed away. It was never baptized by fire, for that is still to come. It has had shorter periods of good health, but longer ones of ailing. Most of the time there have been pains and aches in some parts of its anatomy, but now that it is growing old, complications have set in, and all the ailments seem to be everywhere. The world has been ‘cliniced,’ and the complex diseases have been catalogued. The physicians have had summit consultations, and temporary salve has been rubbed on afflicted parts, but it has only postponed the fatal day and never cured it. It seems that while remedies have been applied, staph infection has set in, and the patient’s suffering intensified. His mind is wandering. It cannot remember its previous illnesses nor the cure which was applied. The political physicians through the ages have rejected suggested remedies as unprofessional since they came from lowly prophets. Man being what he is with tendencies such as he has, results can be prognosticated with some degree of accuracy.

First, you need something to organize: ideas, material, scraps of expertise, recipes, prognostications, anecdotes, scurrilous gossip, anything that might be relevant to what you want to write. And you get this stuff by hoarding it, by faithfully making notes and squirreling them away.

grief. The first is anticipatory. This is hospice grief. Prognostic grief. This is the grief that comes when you drive your dog to the vet for the very last time. This is the death row inmate’s family’s grief. See that pain in the distance? It’s on its way. This is the grief that it is somewhat possible to prepare for. You finish all business. You come to terms. Goodbyes are said and said again. Anguish stalks the chambers of your heart and you steel yourself for the impending presence of an everlasting absence. This grief is an instrument of torture. It squeezes and pulls and presses down. Grief that follows an immediate loss comes on like a stab wound. This is the second kind of grief. It is a cutting pain and it is always a surprise. You never see it coming. It is a grief that can’t be

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

I need to be more in the moment, like when I was wet and wild in the waves. Being in the moment—right now!—equals freedom. It can't be scrutinized, analyzed, rhapsodized, mythologized. It can't be desecrated, debated, prognosticated. Right now can only be lived. Isn't this the same message I tried to get across to the kiddies in the lecture that got me fired? Isn't this the same advice Gladdie gave me right before she died? Why is it that the most fundamental life lesson—LIVE!—is the one I continually forget to put into practice?

Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred. Contrast this with shorter timescales: most technologies that will have a big impact on the world in five or ten years from now are already in limited use, while technologies that will reshape the world in less than fifteen years probably exist as laboratory prototypes. Twenty

ESPN, is having the ability to foretell future outcomes in sports.

Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906]

versions of Hippocrates’ Prognostics, Galen On Foods, and

there’s that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they’re personally invested in.

The prognosticating groundhog is thought to derive from a German tradition that if the sun comes out on Candlemas Day and the hedgehog sees his shadow, six more weeks of winter will follow.

He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail. ("Introduction" to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

During the same period Szilard wrote Michael Polanyi he would “stay in England until one year before the war, at which time I would shift my residence to New York City.”896 The letter provoked comment, Szilard enjoyed recalling; it was “very funny, because how can anyone say what he will do one year before the war?” As it turned out, his prognostication was off by only four months: he arrived in the United States on January 2, 1938.

On the third day my mother sickened; her fever was very malignant, and the looks of her attendants prognosticated the worst event. On her death-bed the fortitude and benignity of this admirable woman did not desert her.

Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits—that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information—make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident—the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS classroom.

Two decades is a sweet spot for prognosticators of radical change: near enough to be attention-grabbing and relevant, yet far enough to make it possible to suppose that a string of breakthroughs, currently only vaguely imaginable, might by then have occurred.

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: "'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over—and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. "'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.' "So the men did, and they died. "But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.

Ask a pig, sometime, about the trouble predicting the future from the past." "I stared at him, trying to decide if he was joking. "I've been short on prognosticating pigs." "Life is perfect for a pig," Ruc said. "Plenty of slops. A shed to keep off the rain. A good wallow. Every day for months a pig wakes up to the same perfect life. Sometimes for years. Then someone ties his hind legs together and cuts his throat while he squeals... The fact that my head's still attached at my neck doesn't mean no one's sharpening a knife.

The early researchers described em-tracking as a hardware upgrade for the nervous system, maybe the result of a genetic shift, possibly a fast adaptation, Studies revealed an assortment of cognitive improvements: acute perceptual sensitivity, rapid data acquisition, high speed pattern recognition. The biggest change was in future prediction. Normally, the human brain is a selfish prognosticator, built to trace an individual’s path into the future. The em-tracker’s brain offers a wider oracle, capable of following a whole culture’s path into the future.

Another error that prognosticators make is to consider the transformations that will result from a single trend in today’s world as if nothing else will change. A good example is the concern that radical life extension will result in overpopulation and the exhaustion of limited material resources to sustain human life, which ignores comparably radical wealth creation from nanotechnology and strong AI. For example, nanotechnology-based manufacturing devices in the 2020s will be capable of creating almost any physical product from inexpensive raw materials and information.

We, none of us, said anything to this flight of fancy. It was so far from our prognostications. Besides, we were shocked at his tone. (Of course, now I recognise it as frustrated idealism—now I write the word in connection with Paul it surprises me. It’s the first time I’ve believed he was capable of it.) He

Mr. Lincoln is already defeated. He cannot be re-elected.

Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.

Can we ever hope for a Natural History with colored plates that will show us how the world appears to the faceted eyes of a dragon-fly?

Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer.

No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find, My subject is of man, and human kind.

The physician, to whom the soldiers of the watch had carried him at the first moment, had feared for his life during the space of a week, and had even told him so in Latin. But youth had gained the upper hand; and, as frequently happens, in spite of prognostications and diagnoses, nature had amused herself by saving the sick man under the physician's very nose.

As my skills increased, so too did my responsibility. Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.

In Isaiah’s description of the downfall of Babylon, the city so famed for its astrologers, we find mention of Hobhre Shamayim,[344] that is, dividers of the heavens, astrologers who divide the heavens into houses for the convenience of their prognostications. The same persons are then described as Chozim bakkokhabhim, star-gazers, those who study the stars for the purpose of taking horoscopes.

And in these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which by reason of the different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.

There’s no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you’re a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it’s a vastly lethal pandemic.)

With a whistle of the wind, And an icy snow flurry. Off to Gobbler's Knob, Come now let us hurry! It is February second! Groundhog's Day! We need some prognostication, On this cold winter's day. Happy Groundhog Day to you! Punxsutawney Phil, do come out of your cave! For whether you cast a fair shadow, or no shadow you see on this day! We send many warm wishes, Of good tidings and cheer! For when it is Groundhog's Day, Springtime is surely near!

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief- that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never...intended. So they said to one another: "Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever that will mock the credulity of man...We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over- and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.

Do not disturb your mind,” said Imlac, “with other hopes or fears than reason may suggest; if you are pleased with the prognostics of good, you will be terrified likewise with tokens of evil, and your whole life will be a prey to superstition.

As a Dutch host, if you come to an inn in Germnay and dislike your fare, diet, lodging, etc., replies in a surly tone, Aliud tibi quaeras diversorium, If you like not this, get you to another inn: I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else.

Middle East pundits, like most pundits, seldom bother to review their past political prognostications. But in this case it is clear who got it right and who got it wrong. As I predicted, the PLO’s Fatah did not stand up to Hamas and indeed often joined it in terrorist attacks. In 1994, shortly after Arafat was brought to Gaza from Tunis, an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel began. After Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Fatah caved to Hamas, which has since used the territory to launch more than ten thousand rockets into Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon, Beer-Sheba, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many other parts of Israel.

Facilia sic putant omnes quce jam facta, nec de salebris cogitant, ubi via strata [when a thing has once been done, people think it easy; when the road is made, they forget how rough the way used to be]; so men are valued, their labours vilified by fellows of no worth themselves, as things of naught, who could not have done as much.

When I go musing all alone Thinking of divers things fore-known. When I build castles in the air, Void of sorrow and void of fear, Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet, Methinks the time runs very fleet. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. When I lie waking all alone, Recounting what I have ill done, My thoughts on me then tyrannise, Fear and sorrow me surprise, Whether I tarry still or go, Methinks the time moves very slow. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so mad as melancholy. When to myself I act and smile, With pleasing thoughts the time beguile, By a brook side or wood so green, Unheard, unsought for, or unseen, A thousand pleasures do me bless, And crown my soul with happiness. All my joys besides are folly, None so sweet as melancholy. When I lie, sit, or walk alone, I sigh, I grieve, making great moan, In a dark grove, or irksome den, With discontents and Furies then, A thousand miseries at once Mine heavy heart and soul ensconce, All my griefs to this are jolly, None so sour as melancholy. Methinks I hear, methinks I see, Sweet music, wondrous melody, Towns, palaces, and cities fine; Here now, then there; the world is mine, Rare beauties, gallant ladies shine, Whate'er is lovely or divine. All other joys to this are folly, None so sweet as melancholy. Methinks I hear, methinks I see Ghosts, goblins, fiends; my phantasy Presents a thousand ugly shapes, Headless bears, black men, and apes, Doleful outcries, and fearful sights, My sad and dismal soul affrights. All my griefs to this are jolly, None so damn'd as melancholy. Methinks I court, methinks I kiss, Methinks I now embrace my mistress. O blessed days, O sweet content, In Paradise my time is spent. Such thoughts may still my fancy move, So may I ever be in love. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. When I recount love's many frights, My sighs and tears, my waking nights, My jealous fits; O mine hard fate I now repent, but 'tis too late. No torment is so bad as love, So bitter to my soul can prove. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so harsh as melancholy. Friends and companions get you gone, 'Tis my desire to be alone; Ne'er well but when my thoughts and I Do domineer in privacy. No Gem, no treasure like to this, 'Tis my delight, my crown, my bliss. All my joys to this are folly, Naught so sweet as melancholy. 'Tis my sole plague to be alone, I am a beast, a monster grown, I will no light nor company, I find it now my misery. The scene is turn'd, my joys are gone, Fear, discontent, and sorrows come. All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so fierce as melancholy. I'll not change life with any king, I ravisht am: can the world bring More joy, than still to laugh and smile, In pleasant toys time to beguile? Do not, O do not trouble me, So sweet content I feel and see. All my joys to this are folly, None so divine as melancholy. I'll change my state with any wretch, Thou canst from gaol or dunghill fetch; My pain's past cure, another hell, I may not in this torment dwell! Now desperate I hate my life, Lend me a halter or a knife; All my griefs to this are jolly, Naught so damn'd as melancholy.

Persuasion Alert Self-deprecating humor is an acceptable way to brag. Mentioning a moment of boneheadedness at my former company beats the far more obnoxious “I was a high-level manager at a publishing company that had twenty-three million customers the year I left.” The term du jour for this device: humblebrag. So I’m a lousy prognosticator of bestsellers. In retrospect, however, I can explain why the title was not such a bad idea after all. “South Beach” conjures an image of people—you—in bathing attire. It says vacation, one of the chief reasons people go on a diet. The Rodale editors stimulated an emotion by making readers picture a desirable and highly personal goal: you, in a bathing suit, looking great. So

And barbarians were inventors not only of philosophy, but almost of every art. The Egyptians were the first to introduce astrology among men. Similarly also the Chaldeans. The Egyptians first showed how to burn lamps, and divided the year into twelve months, prohibited intercourse with women in the temples, and enacted that no one should enter the temples from a woman without bathing. Again, they were the inventors of geometry. There are some who say that the Carians invented prognostication by the stars. The Phrygians were the first who attended to the flight of birds. And the Tuscans, neighbours of Italy, were adepts at the art of the Haruspex. The Isaurians and the Arabians invented augury, as the Telmesians divination by dreams. The Etruscans invented the trumpet, and the Phrygians the flute. For Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygians. And Cadmus, the inventor of letters among the Greeks, as Euphorus says, was a Phoenician; whence also Herodotus writes that they were called Phoenician letters. And they say that the Phoenicians and the Syrians first invented letters; and that Apis, an aboriginal inhabitant of Egypt, invented the healing art before Io came into Egypt. But afterwards they say that Asclepius improved the art. Atlas the Libyan was the first who built a ship and navigated the sea. Kelmis and Damnaneus, Idaean Dactyli, first discovered iron in Cyprus. Another Idaean discovered the tempering of brass; according to Hesiod, a Scythian. The Thracians first invented what is called a scimitar (arph), -- it is a curved sword, -- and were the first to use shields on horseback. Similarly also the Illyrians invented the shield (pelth). Besides, they say that the Tuscans invented the art of moulding clay; and that Itanus (he was a Samnite) first fashioned the oblong shield (qureos). Cadmus the Phoenician invented stonecutting, and discovered the gold mines on the Pangaean mountain. Further, another nation, the Cappadocians, first invented the instrument called the nabla, and the Assyrians in the same way the dichord. The Carthaginians were the first that constructed a triterme; and it was built by Bosporus, an aboriginal. Medea, the daughter of Æetas, a Colchian, first invented the dyeing of hair. Besides, the Noropes (they are a Paeonian race, and are now called the Norici) worked copper, and were the first that purified iron. Amycus the king of the Bebryci was the first inventor of boxing-gloves. In music, Olympus the Mysian practised the Lydian harmony; and the people called Troglodytes invented the sambuca, a musical instrument. It is said that the crooked pipe was invented by Satyrus the Phrygian; likewise also diatonic harmony by Hyagnis, a Phrygian too; and notes by Olympus, a Phrygian; as also the Phrygian harmony, and the half-Phrygian and the half-Lydian, by Marsyas, who belonged to the same region as those mentioned above. And the Doric was invented by Thamyris the Thracian. We have heard that the Persians were the first who fashioned the chariot, and bed, and footstool; and the Sidonians the first to construct a trireme. The Sicilians, close to Italy, were the first inventors of the phorminx, which is not much inferior to the lyre. And they invented castanets. In the time of Semiramis queen of the Assyrians, they relate that linen garments were invented. And Hellanicus says that Atossa queen of the Persians was the first who composed a letter. These things are reported by Seame of Mitylene, Theophrastus of Ephesus, Cydippus of Mantinea also Antiphanes, Aristodemus, and Aristotle and besides these, Philostephanus, and also Strato the Peripatetic, in his books Concerning Inventions. I have added a few details from them, in order to confirm the inventive and practically useful genius of the barbarians, by whom the Greeks profited in their studies. And if any one objects to the barbarous language, Anacharsis says, "All the Greeks speak Scythian to me." [...]

Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability. I made mistakes. Rushing a patient to the OR to save only enough brain that his heart beats but he can never speak, he eats through a tube, and he is condemned to an existence he would never want…I came to see this as a more egregious failure than the patient dying.

But if you are agreed to carry out this plan, there is one further counsel which I would urge upon you. Send to Dodona and to Delphi, I would beg you, and consult the will of Heaven whether such a provision and such a policy on our part be truly to the interest of Athens both for the present and for the time to come. If the consent of Heaven be thus obtained, we ought then, I say, to put a further question: whose special favour among the gods shall we seek to secure with a view to the happier execution of these measures? And in accordance with that answer, let us offer a sacrifice of happy omen to the deities so named, and commence the work; since if these transactions be so carried out with the will of God, have we not the right to prognosticate some further advance in the path of political progress for this whole state?

For it is true historically that those who have shown the greatest subtlety with language have shown the greatest power to understand (this does not exclude Sophists, for Plato made the point that one must be able to see the truth accurately in order to judge one’s distance from it if he is practicing deception). To take a contemporary example which has statistical support: American universities have found that with few exceptions students who display the greatest mastery of words, as evidenced by vocabulary tests and exercises in writing, make the best scholastic records regardless of the department of study they enter. For physics, for chemistry, for engineering—it matters not how superficially unrelated to language the branch of study may be—command of language will prognosticate aptitude. Facility with words bespeaks a capacity to learn relations and grasp concepts; it is a means of access to the complex reality. Evidently

Diseases of the future, needless to say, are a matter of high concern to public health officials and scientists. There’s no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you’re a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it’s a vastly lethal pandemic.) Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people? The concept by now is so codified, in fact, that we could think of it as the NBO. The chief difference between HIV-1 and the NBO may turn out to be that HIV-1 does its killing so slowly. Most other new viruses work fast.

In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other.

Măsuraţi-o cu o alta ce stă alături de ea - aceasta ar fi piatra de încercare -, comparaţi-le punându-le mână lângă mână, trup lângă trup, faţă în faţă, ochi în ochi, nas în nas, gât lângă gât etc., studiaţi-i fiecare părticică a corpului cu atenţie, apoi, în întregime în toate atitudinile, în câteva locuri şi spuneţi-mi cum vă place acum. S-ar putea să nu vi se mai pară la fel de mândră, fără anumite veşminte... După cum recomandă poetul, pune-i deoparte hainele, gândeşte-te cum ar fi dacă ai vedea-o purtând haina din pânză de sac a unui sărman sau îmbrăcată în nişte straie uzate, zdrenţuite şi demodate, cu lenjerie murdară, în straie aspre, mânjită cu funingine...

Despite Imbry's demurrals, Ghyll never missed an opportunity to expound on his creed, and was now again launched upon a lecture. "Life, after all," he said, "is but a succession of greater and lesser probabilities—a melange of maybes, as the Grand Prognosticator so aptly put it. Look at you, here in the supposed security of Bolly's Snug, supping and swilling with nary a care. Yet can you deny that a fragment of some asteroid, shattered in a collision far out in thither space back when humankind was still adrip with the primordial slime, having spent millions of years looming toward us, might now, its moment come, lance down through the atmosphere at immense speed and obliterate you where you stand?" "I do not deny the possibility," said Imbry. "I say that the likelihood is remote." "Yet still it exists! And if we couple that existence to a divine appetite for upsetting mortal plans—" "I can think of other, less far-fetched scenarios that might lead to the obliteration of someone in this room," said the thief. He accompanied the remark with an unwinking stare that ought to have caused Ghyll to stop to consider that, though Imbry was so corpulent as to be almost spherical, he was capable of sudden and conclusive acts of violence. And that consideration would have led, in turn, to a change of subject. But the Computant was too deeply set in his philosophy to take note of how others responded to it, and continued to discourse on abstruse concerns.

If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.

The old practice of using muskets acquired a dark reputation, largely due to the efforts of Adam’s father, who found sympathy in many others in the community, including former Mayor Increase Gladford. He claimed they promoted weak morals and were a hazard to children. In fact, he prognosticated that at some time in the future, these devices would become sufficiently dangerous that individuals would regularly assault the children in the schoolhouse, or the children themselves would become so corrupted

I will never be a scholar, but this I know: talk of omens and portents is ridiculous. Star charts are fine for navigation, but not prognostication. Perhaps someday people will accept that the time of prophecy has passed and take upon themselves the responsibility of their own decisions.

The beginning of trusting yourself is merely understanding that your thoughts are in your head for a purpose. They matter, and they are valid. Listen to your own opinions, rather than the nagging echoes of fearful friends and family. Too often those thoughts that creep into our heads are fear-driven, wild prognostications of failure, carnage, and financial ruin, that usually begin with, “What if . . . ?” But where your thoughts go, you go. It takes faith in yourself and your abilities to see these thoughts as the imposters they are. When the fog of doubt is cleared, the imposters banished, we can begin to see more clearly our true nature and instincts. Then, with a little faith in yourself, you can raise your sights, look up from the abyss of failure, and take the next step. Then the one after that. Trusting yourself gives you the faith that people will hear your message, be inspired by your cause, and rise to your challenge.

3) Chrislam is an Obvious False Teaching that Has Entered Christianity: Marloes Janson and Birgit Meyer state that Chrislam merges Christianity and Islam. This syncretistic movement rests upon the belief that following Christianity or Islam alone will not guarantee salvation. Chrislamists participate in Christian and Islamic beliefs and practices. During a religious service Tela Tella, the founder of Ifeoluwa, Nigeria’s first Chrislamic movement, proclaimed that “Moses is Jesus and Jesus is Muhammad; peace be upon all of them – we love them all.’” Marloes Janson says he met with a church member who calls himself a Chrislamist. The man said, “You can’t be a Christian without being a Muslim, and you can’t be a Muslim without being a Christian.” These statements reflect the mindset of this community, which mixes Islam with Christianity, and African culture. Samsindeen Saka, a self-proclaimed prophet, also promotes Chrislam. Mr. Saka founded the Oke Tude Temple in Nigeria in 1989. The church's name means the mountain of loosening bondage. His approach adds a charismatic flavor to Chrislam. He says those bound by Satan; are set free through fasting and prayer. Saka says when these followers are set free from evil spirits. Then, the Holy Spirit possesses them. Afterward, they experience miracles of healing and prosperity in all areas of their life. He also claims that combining Christianity and Islam relieves political tension between these groups. This pastor seeks to take dominion of the world in the name of Chrislam (1). Today, Chrislam has spread globally, but with much resistance from the Orthodox (Christians, Muslims, and Jews). Richard Mather of Israeli International News says Chrislamists recognize both the Judeo-Christian “Bible and the Quran as holy texts.” So, they fuse these religions by removing Jewish references from the Bible. Thereby neutralizing the prognostic relevance “of the Jewish people and the land of Israel.” This fusion of Islam with Christianity is a rebranded form of replacement theology (2) (3). Also, traditional Muslims do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore, they do not believe Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world. Thus, these religions cannot merge without destroying the foundations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. References: 1. Janson, Marloes, and Birgit Meyer. “Introduction: Towards a Framework for the Study of Christian-Muslim Encounters in Africa.” Africa, Vol. 86, no. 4, 2016, pp. 615-619, 2. Mather, Richard. “What is Chrislam?” Arutz Sheva – Israel International News. Jewish Media Agency, 02 March 2015, 3. Janson, Marloes. Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and ‘Yoruba Religion' in Lagos, Nigeria, (The International African Library Book 64). Cambridge University Press. 2021.

This form of capitalism requires the constant production of desire. We now spend in the US somewhere around $200 billion a year on advertising, somewhere around $500 billion a year on marketing, and then around the world you can see those costs just skyrocketing. All of that is to make sure that people’s wants are redefined as needs. That’s the point of advertising and marketing. That’s how it works. That’s what it’s for. The constant production of desire. I like to invert the old maxim that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Under capitalism, unless you already can prognosticate a market, you’d better not be producing that product. So “invention becomes the mother of necessity.” You just flip that around and you get the sort of capitalist form. Every advertisement … You can try this out yourself. Go home and take a look at an advertisement on TV or wherever. You’ll see these ads take a very particular form. They’re like a little parable, every one. They first produce an anxiety in you. Something’s wrong with you. You know, you don’t look right, you’re never going to get the partner of your choice, this and that. They produce a little anxiety. Then they give you the message that the anxiety can be resolved by purchasing something. That step is at two levels. One, purchasing their particular product, good, or service. But the idea also that problems can be very easily defined in these simple terms, and solved by the purchase of a product, a good, or a service. Every advertisement takes this form. It produces an anxiety, it tells you that the problem can be addressed by purchasing, and then it tells you what to purchase. Try this out. Take a look at a number of ads, and see if they don’t work that way.

Simon didn’t believe in psychics but in the first few years after meeting Gloria, he did wonder. She showed remarkable accuracy about future events, it couldn’t be denied. Now he thought that her gift wasn’t prognostication, it was command. The very universe itself was nervous about going against her wishes.

Showiness has become the malady of our times; haven’t wedding cards come to resemble wall posters. None seems to mind that the card and the copy don’t jell at all; maybe, it’s all prognostic, who knows?

prognostication

risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. So we propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads.

prognostications,

Even as I approached the emergency room that first night, my thoughts were the measured, structured thoughts of a physician. I was unable to relate to myself as a patient. Presented with the problem of pain, I responded by listing differential diagnoses and prognosticating for myself. When I found myself dizzy and unable to stand in OB triage, the physician in me perversely enjoyed experiencing shock firsthand. The intensity of my focus on medicine was such that I felt fortunate to have the learning opportunity, to personally engage with the pathophysiology I had studied for so long. I knew I was dying, and I was still awestruck by the science of my decline.

Ambition! A simple word, yet so many multi-prognostics! At the outset, it arouses an array of positive emotions; zeal, success, energy, rise, achievement, forward, bright, shining, higher, respect etc. But there is another side too; defeat, listless, failure, slump, disgrace…and such.

It seems that, over and above his basic powers of glamour, Gwynn had extra magical knowledge- as would befit a king. The Welsh Triads state that he had great knowledge about the stars and their influences: “Such was [his] knowledge of the stars, their natures and qualities, that [he] could prognosticate whatever was wished to be known until the day of doom. and could predict the future from them.” It is perhaps for this reason that the Cornish story of The House on Silena Moor mentions the pixies worshipping stars, which might be a relic of much older British folk knowledge.

Ashish Bhatt answered, “Often those persons who live successfully with schizophrenia are ones who have positive prognostic factors, which include good premorbid functioning, later age of symptom onset, sudden symptom onset, higher education, good support system, early diagnosis and treatment, medication adherence, and longer periods of minimal or absent symptoms between episodes.

Some say that the spiritual founder of the Rosicrucians was Paracelsus himself. In Huser's edition of his Prognostication Concerning the Next Twenty-four Years there is a woodcut of a child looking toward a heap of Paracelsus's books, some inscribed with a capital R and one bearing the word Rosa. But the significance of this imagery for the Rosicrucians seems spurious.* The rose that the secret society chose as its symbol is in fact derived from the emblem of Martin Luther, in which a heart and cross spring from the center of the flower. The movement began as a society of Protestant Paracelsians founded by the alchemist Johann Valentin Andreae of Herrenberg. *The Paracelsus connection remains puzzling, however. In the first edition of the Philosophia Magna, published by Birckmann in 1567, the Hirschvogel woodcut of Paracelsus appears in modified form with various strange images in the background that later became clearly associated with Rosicrucianism, such as a child's head emerging from a cleft in the ground. What is the significance of these symbols, fifty years before the Rosicrucian movement came into the open?

To be sure, Barbie is a toy, and in market research sessions, as Barbie's first advertising copywriter Cy Schneider has pointed out, children, presented with choices that can be characterized as "tasteful, gaudy, gaudier, or gaudiest," invariably choose "gaudiest." But Barbie is also a reflection of her times—or a reflection of how market researchers and professional prognosticators interpret them. And perhaps therein lies the paradox.

I would desire to have no other prison than a library, and to be chained together with as many good authors.

But that’s not the worst part of this corporate American tradition. The worst? That odious moment occurs when all of the supervisors and their assistants dress up in their Sunday best, and gather at the front entrance to the warehouse-sized building we call home. Think of it as a grand procession headed straight up corporate leadership’s pompous asses. I completely envied every one of my peers who, through the gift of prognostication or just plain old luck managed to request the day off, long in advance. On

I have a prognostication that your highest bidder is of Royal decent.

Another piece of paper discovered among my father’s effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist’s report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service–related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy’s prophesy would eventually prove to be. In

Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp. Their skin is spotlit for predators. That’s why you don’t see albino Seths [Ava’s pet name for alligators] in the wild. Once an alligator reaches a size of four feet its only real predator is man.

Terminology and classification Leukaemias are traditionally classified into four main groups: • acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) • acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) • chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) • chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). In acute leukaemia there is proliferation of primitive stem cells leading to an accumulation of blasts, predominantly in the bone marrow, which causes bone marrow failure. In chronic leukaemia the malignant clone is able to differentiate, resulting in an accumulation of more mature cells. Lymphocytic and lymphoblastic cells are those derived from the lymphoid stem cell (B cells and T cells). Myeloid refers to the other lineages, i.e. precursors of red cells, granulocytes, monocytes and platelets (see Fig. 24.2, p. 989). The diagnosis of leukaemia is usually suspected from an abnormal blood count, often a raised white count, and is confirmed by examination of the bone marrow. This includes the morphology of the abnormal cells, analysis of cell surface markers (immunophenotyping), clone-specific chromosome abnormalities and molecular changes. These results are incorporated in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues; the subclassification of acute leukaemias is shown in Box 24.47. The features in the bone marrow not only provide an accurate diagnosis but also give valuable prognostic information, allowing therapy to be tailored to the patient’s disease.

He was no longer, at least in his mind, the most wanted man in America. He was an analyst, a seer, a prognosticator going over his reams of data, moving their pieces, twisting them, testing them, discounting some, fleshing out others, slowly transforming disjointed intelligence into something that made sense.

A widely quoted study from the Oxford Martin School predicts that technology threatens to replace 47 percent of all US jobs within 20 years. One of Pew experts even foresees the advent of “robotic sex partners.’’ The world’s oldest profession may be no more. When all this happens, what, exactly, will people do? Half of those in the Pew report are relatively unconcerned, believing — as has happened in the past — that even as technology destroys jobs, it creates more new ones. But half are deeply worried, fearing burgeoning unemployment, a growing schism between the highly educated and everyone else, and potentially massive social dislocation. (The fact that Pew’s experts are evenly split also exposes one of the truths of prognostication: A coin flip might work just as well.) Much of this debate over more or fewer jobs misses a key element, one brought up by some of those surveyed by Pew: These are primarily political issues; what happens is up to us. If lower-skilled jobs are no more, the solution, quite obviously, is training and education. Moreover, the coming world of increasingly ubiquitous robotics has the potential for significant increases in productivity. Picture, for instance, an entirely automated farm, with self-replicating and self-repairing machines planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and delivering. Food wouldn’t be free, but it could become so cheap that, like water (Detroit excepted), it’s essentially available to everyone for an almost nominal cost. It’s a welfare state, of course, but at some point, with machines able to produce the basic necessities of life, why not? We’d have a world of less drudgery and more leisure. People would spend more time doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It might even cause us to rethink what it means to be human. Robots will allow us to use our “intelligence in new ways, freeing us up from menial tasks,’’ says Tiffany Shlain, host of AOL’s “The Future Starts Here.’’ Just as Lennon hoped and Star Trek predicted.

Today, a science fiction writer looking for a futuristic tale of silicon dominance would not pick upon the chemistry of silicon so much as the physics of silicon for his prognostications. But this form of silicon life could not have evolved spontaneously : it requires a carbon-based life-form to act as a catalyst. We are that catalyst.

Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. So we propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads. In

Toward the end of that splendid evening, I did not have the audacity to unveil this prognostication to my chaperone. Although I confided all that transpired with the Duchess, I left out the presage of our impending severance, and as an adult, I came to regret it.

Maybe that’s why goalkeepers tend to be reflective types, prone to introversion, trying, perhaps, to rationalise why such unfair things happen to such undeserving people. The question, I suppose, is whether gloomy prognosticators are drawn to goalkeeping or whether goalkeeping makes them like that.

universities have found that with few exceptions students who display the greatest mastery of words, as evidenced by vocabulary tests and exercises in writing, make the best scholastic records regardless of the department of study they enter. For physics, for chemistry, for engineering—it matters not how superficially unrelated to language the branch of study may be—command of language will prognosticate aptitude. Facility with words bespeaks a capacity to learn relations and grasp concepts; it is a means of access to the complex reality.

But that prescribed social necessity began to give some gay men pause. A thirty-seven-year-old Studio One regular spoke with ambivalence to the Times in 1976. ‘Even the dances have a depersonalized quality to them. The Hustle and The Bus Stop, for instance. In both, you have 50 or 100 people lined up, dancing the same way, completely unattached to each other, simply doing the same movements, like robots. Like lemmings, they begin to form those lines.’ He went on to prognosticate a dystopian future, what he called the ultimate discotheque: ‘I can envision the day when we all just walk up to the entrance to a disco, put a bunch of quarters in a slot, enter and become immediately surrounded by music. Then each of us will go into a space the size of a telephone booth and dance by ourselves.

prognosticator

Prophetic ministers and believers in Christ’s return are continually mocked as doom and gloom prognosticators whose messages only spread fear and anxiety.

As a full-time prognosticator of doom—that is, a twenty-first-century realist—I was relatively prepared for the pandemic when it hit hard in March 2020.

In 2013, on the auspicious date of April 1, I received an email from Tetlock inviting me to join what he described as “a major new research program funded in part by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency within the U.S. intelligence community.” The core of the program, which had been running since 2011, was a collection of quantifiable forecasts much like Tetlock’s long-running study. The forecasts would be of economic and geopolitical events, “real and pressing matters of the sort that concern the intelligence community—whether Greece will default, whether there will be a military strike on Iran, etc.” These forecasts took the form of a tournament with thousands of contestants; the tournament ran for four annual seasons. “You would simply log on to a website,” Tetlock’s email continued, “give your best judgment about matters you may be following anyway, and update that judgment if and when you feel it should be. When time passes and forecasts are judged, you could compare your results with those of others.” I did not participate. I told myself I was too busy; perhaps I was too much of a coward as well. But the truth is that I did not participate because, largely thanks to Tetlock’s work, I had concluded that the forecasting task was impossible. Still, more than 20,000 people embraced the idea. Some could reasonably be described as having some professional standing, with experience in intelligence analysis, think tanks, or academia. Others were pure amateurs. Tetlock and two other psychologists, Barbara Mellers (Mellers and Tetlock are married) and Don Moore, ran experiments with the cooperation of this army of volunteers. Some were given training in some basic statistical techniques (more on this in a moment); some were assembled into teams; some were given information about other forecasts; and others operated in isolation. The entire exercise was given the name Good Judgment Project, and the aim was to find better ways to see into the future. This vast project has produced a number of insights, but the most striking is that there was a select group of people whose forecasts, while they were by no means perfect, were vastly better than the dart-throwing-chimp standard reached by the typical prognosticator. What is more, they got better over time rather than fading away as their luck changed. Tetlock, with an uncharacteristic touch of hyperbole, called this group “superforecasters.” The cynics were too hasty: it is possible to see into the future after all. What makes a superforecaster? Not subject-matter expertise: professors were no better than well-informed amateurs. Nor was it a matter of intelligence; otherwise Irving Fisher would have been just fine. But there were a few common traits among the better forecasters.

The nature of belief equals all possibilities ultimately true by identification through culture to an idea of time, so what is not timely is not true, and what is not true, prognostication. Thought of one thing, implies the possibility of another idea as contradicting but not dissociated, belief is to make “one” more convincing. The condition of belief is the denial or limit imposed on the capability of the vitality. To believe at all as such is a concentration and schooling to exclude the implied by adopting a a hypothesis or faith that reflects non-worryingly or deceitfully rationalizes the rejected. Truth is not the truth of formula.