The Historic Arts Of Prognostication & Procrastination
Half A Millennium Of Outrageous Claims & Deferred Accountability
Albrecht Durer was a little early to our dance when he created Melencholia I in 1514. I guess he just wasn’t much of a procrastinator, but then he would die a few decades before that term was coined. He was, perhaps, a prognosticator — but that word was decades away as well. Both terms were coined in the back half of the 16th century.
Leonardi Da Vinci has been ordained both a prognosticator and a procrastinator by many and the exact opposite by many more. But then his life and work predated either of these terms as well.
On the other hand — the revered (or reviled) Nostradamus did live long enough to hear the word prognosticator used — likely alongside his own name. He would not live long enough to hear the term procrastinator… that came about a decade or so after his death. But I guess we was tired of waiting…
As the Renaissance came to its end, these terms emerged on the scene. Their connection, aside from each word’s length (15 letters of which 11 are identical), is perhaps not as apparent on first review as it might seem. But for the next five centuries, many famous (or perhaps infamous) people would learn to leverage both. It could be stated — they found a way.
The Northwest passage, Strait of Anian, Xanadu, El Dorado, and the rest all dominated the next century. Drake may have succeeded at circumnavigating the globe, but he failed at finding the Strait of Anian. So to be clear, he did the impossible but could not find the non-existent. This was a consistent tale as the age of exploration progressed. Fanciful predictions of mystical places led to decades long quests, most often to no avail. It basically became vogue to make insane prognostications knowing it would take decades to prove them wrong.
As the Age of Exploration gave way to the Age of Science, the pattern continued. Francis Bacon may have developed a new discipline, but that did not prevent others from exploiting it to make insane prognostications of their own. Each, of course, was paired with a very deferred timeline of its own. They might be proven wrong, but that would take a very, very long time.
Thomas Malthus arrived on the scene at the end of the 1700’s. His prognostications were every bit as ludicrous as those who predicted easy passage and cities of gold. Rather than years of searching, he leveraged decades of never ending growth. His predictions would prove wrong but not until decades after his death. Of course, this did not stop Malthusians from believing or pushing for policy changes in the name of stopping his unaccountable predictions.
Of course, many still believe today. Of course, many still believe in the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus, too. Create a prediction with a long enough time horizon and people will procrastinate on disbelief for a ridiculous amount of time. It is a winning pattern that is gaining in popularity. Non-accountability tends to be popular among those pretending to be prognosticators.
And so the singularity will come… eventually, won’t it? Our AI Overlords will rise… or will they? Cars will fly… civilizations will end… markets will crash and never return… and the seas will boil… or not? Actually, the only thing likely to happen is that those who pretend to see the future will make more predictions far into the future with little chance of accountability and every assurance the public would rather procrastinate then disbelieve.
Prognostication and procrastination are oddly linked in the annuls of history, from their arrival to their usage. It is a circumnavigation of history and a unbreakable facet of human behavior. Those unsure of their science will always seek to avoid accountability at any cost. The world has become too small for lost places but time dependably marches on.
Although should time machines ever happen… they won’t… there is always the depths of space to probe. Superior alien life is out there somewhere… right? We just need to keep looking… and thanks for reading.
