Which is a far more convincing argument when someone can point to a well-documented set of predictions, than when they claim "I'm right a lot" and try to get you to fall for an association fallacy.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan
If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.
If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.
The thing you should take from Scott Adams isn't his predictions.
It's the fact that he has spent 30 years writing Dilbert, which means he has followed the pulse of general office-culture, coupled with the fact that he is a train hypnotist, so he knows how people think.
Basically, he will often give an interesting take on some current event that gives you a perspective on the situation that you hadn't considered.
Like NN Taleb and Nate Silver, once you've groked their general schtick (long tails, Bayesian probability) there isn't a whole lot new they have to offer. It's worth checking back in on them from time to time, but you're unlikely to be blown away by anything you see.
Mike Cernovich is a lot more interesting to follow on Twitter than Scott Adams. Adams is basically a pundit at this point. Cernovich is more of a journalist, so he follows and retweets breaking news that you're likely to hear about in the upcoming news cycles.
The thing I like to keep in mind is that its important to follow people you don't always agree with, because otherwise you are missing out on a lot of perspectives and don't have as good a view of the current political landscape.
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
They've both had their moments where they got a bit too full of themselves as well. Taleb in particular.
I checked back recently and it seems they've both come back down out of the clouds, but I don't hold either of them in as high of regard as I did a few years ago.
I guess I'm out of sync with the times. For some reason, my first thought on seeing the title was that it would be about some clever new tricks with the ANSI ATM standard.
When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]
While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)
I was thinking less of people with specific memories, and more of the people those people raised and or interacted with. This can actually have even more of an impact than actually being in the period, as what's related may be selective, and based on what people want to remember.
There's a reason why the 50's in America were portrayed so often as a golden age and a time where things were simpler, and part of that is just people that wanted to remember a time before the 60's and 70's where there was lots of upheaval and unrest. Were the 50's as simple and wholesome as depicted? Surely not, there was plenty of intolerance for those that didn't fit into the mold ("beatniks"), and that's before we even broach the rampant racism, segregation, etc. Yet, if you're of a certain age in America, you were raised on the idea that the 50's were wonderful, everyone lived the nuclear family dream, and everyone's mom was like June Cleaver.
How much this applies to current Afghanistan? I have no idea. But I don't think it's impossible there's quite a bit of rose tinted longing for that age among certain segments of the population, even if they aren't old enough to remember it.
SF author and marine biologist Peter Watts has a trilogy on a very similar premise, where an early "fork" of life (that is actually more efficient than our entire tree of life) got stuck down in the ocean depths at the dawn of time, until we accidentally bring it up.
"Trithemius' most famous work, Steganographia (written c. 1499; published Frankfurt, 1606), was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. This book is in three volumes, and appears to be about magic—specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they have been known to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until recently, the third volume was widely still believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulae have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more cryptographic content."
The Girardoni air rifle was used in military service from the late 18th through early 19th centuries, and saw civilian use for some time after that. It was a very high-tech weapon for the time, and while finicky and expensive offered some unique advantages and was quite deadly. The Lewis & Clark expedition famously used a couple.
This was amazing find. I really am a nerd in this subject but had no idea compressed air was used in the 18th century. This really changed my thinking and historical perspective. You blew my Sunday that I will forgive. I will blow all next weekend trying to figure out why compressed air didn't catch on wtf. From my (limited!!) research the valves were super expensive and took an amazing amount of craftsmanship - which didn't allow for mass production (eg Brown Bess).
Perhaps not less intelligent, but just possessed of a mental framework that was less capable.
From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],
"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"
That’s incredible, and very compelling. It would explain the relatively sudden development of behavioural modernity over the few decades from 70k years ago.
I’ve read competing theories about the sudden development of abstract thinking and it’s propagation through speech as a form of memetic contagion, but I never really found it convincing. This makes perfect sense.
The idea that recursion was the key mutation that led to language is not doing so well lately. It turns out that non-human animals already can produce sequences with recursive structure [1]. It's also not clear that all languages have nested recursive structures.
The hypothesis here is quite a bit more nuanced and specific than that. As a laymam, I found it worthwhile to read the whole article. In the course of making its case it touches on many fascinating topics. I found the case quite compelling, though I can't rule out that someone more familiar with the facts can poke holes in it.
One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, really. It’s unlikely to be true, and unverifiable even so, but is a coherent and compelling frame through which to observe the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy