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Other readers of this blog: do you recall Robin ever admitting that he has made a bad assumption or reasoning error in the past?No, but I can't recall any posts by academic bloggers admitting something like that.

I suspect most editors and readers really know this deep down - they don't really want useful forecasts; this is just an excuse to let readers affiliate with impressive thinkers.I'm not convinced this is a big factor. To me its more like science fiction, which can be but isn't necessarily read in order to affiliate with impressive authors.

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Hopefully they don't rescind the offer after finding Robin's post before this one.

Robin, will you please explain what you were thinking in your last post?

Other readers of this blog: do you recall Robin ever admitting that he has made a bad assumption or reasoning error in the past?

I know Robin is busy but I don't see why he would want to damage his reputation by not explaining or admitting the two clear errors in his last post, which roughly all commenters agree upon.

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Well, it's not like anybody's going to be basing anything off of these forecasts. They're something to read to pass the time, like a novel.

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You don't need to know exactly when something will come for a forecast to be useful. Take the prediction of the web, you could reason that if the web came into existance there would be demand for more IT people. You could try and get yourself into a position where you could retrain into IT (if you were not already), and keep an eye out on tech stocks.

Visionaries allow you to prepare yourself, they give warnings and should allow you to act more quickly and effectively when things do happen. I'll admit few people do prepare themselves, but the potential is there.

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I keep getting this too. One of these days I'm going to snap and tell them that 2009 will finally be the year of the silver jumpsuit.

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