What’s the best kind of prediction? The one you know will come true? Or the one you can’t lose on?

Here’s what I mean:

What do you want this year, Scorpio? What are you passionate about? Your dreams are the focus of 2019, and guess what? Some of them could come true in a big way!

That’s from horoscope.com and by the way I was born on the 13th of November so that makes me a Scorpio. I note that some sites now include Ophiuchus, the Physician or Serpent-bearer, in their list of zodiac signs. That makes thirteen instead of the usual twelve. Even the astrologers have to recognize physical reality once in a while! But that’s later in November, my sun is still in Scorpius.

That’s the best kind of prediction. Some of my dreams “could” come true! They could! If they do, the prognosticators were right. If they don’t, the prognosticators were still right. That’s like flipping a two-headed coin, man. That’s the way to win in the business of astrological forecasting.

Did you know there is a new field called superforecasting? I’ll bet the astrologers could teach those guys a thing or two about hedging your bets. And if the horoscope-types adopted some superforecasting strategies I suspect they’d be right more frequently. Not that it matters, horoscopes are always right, that is, they work by self-fulfillment. You don’t want reality to intrude too far into the prediction racket.

Superforecasters are the type of people who treat everything as testable hypotheses. Certainty is their enemy, oddly enough. They have to be flexible and adaptable, and they adjust their outlook when they get new information. They don’t have biases, or if they do, they have workarounds. Astrology (and other rackets like Freudian analysis) are the opposite—they have an answer for everything. The logic is circular, and the solutions can always be found in a careful re-reading of the text.

The future is heady stuff. You have to be really smart, or a con artist, or both. More likely both.

I say stick to the present.