Reminder that Scott Adams predicted that ISDN would dominate broadband internet back before broadband was a thing. His reasoning: cable companies hired the people who were too stupid to get a job at telephone companies.

The reality today: cable companies dominate the broadband market, and traditional telephone companies offer a different product entirely, DSL. ISDN is basically dead, even in markets where it once had a foothold.

Of course, Mr Adams is counting on most people to not remember the predictions that were wrong. He’s not the only one who does this — the economic Paul Krugman both predicted the economic crash in 2007 and predicted no crash, to give one example. It’s easy to seem like an expert if you’re prolific enough.

Certainly Donald Trump is decent enough at persuasion, but he’s also been very lucky. A little known fact is that Trump ran for president 16 years ago, and was just as outlandish at the time as now, but his ideas and rhetoric weren’t as popular at the time and he had a nasty feud with Pat Buchanan before giving up. Trump’s success is not so much that he’s a master of persuasion, but that his competition were clumsy fools at it, and the fundamental attribution error leads people to miss this.