And while some of these botched prediction lists can be fun to read, giving too much weight to the value of inaccurate forecasts can easily be weaponized. Take, for example, climate change. In certain arenas of the internet, there are memes poking fun at Al Gore for predicting that there might not be any ice left in 2022. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, publishes a list called “Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-Pocalyptic Predictions.” Some of these predictions are just as wrong as the ones that grace the Pessimist’s Archive. In 1970, a scientist quoted by The Boston Globe predicted that “the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States,” and that simultaneously “air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century.” The subtext is that because none of the things happened, the threat of climate change as a whole is clearly overstated.  

But of course we know that isn’t true. Just because people got things wrong about climate change in the past doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real, or that the forecasts of future warming should be ignored. Vinsel sees this problem all the time in historical analysis. “People are reading what we know now back into the sources and not really thinking about how those people are looking at the world and what they're contending with.” Exploring why people got things wrong is useful not simply for the fact of the wrongness, but for exploring what they missed. We should learn not from their collective skepticism, but from their specific worries and what they didn’t understand about the science or technology or culture at play. 

And the way that some list lovers reduce these disparate predictions across centuries and from a wide variety of contexts into a bigger, broader lesson about progress and its inevitable goodness, removes any real specific lesson we might learn from these past predictions. Take the Y2K non-disaster for example—another oft-included item on lists of incorrect predictions. It’s true that the world didn’t shut down on January 1, 2000, but that’s not because the concern was misplaced. It’s because thousands of people worked overtime to patch the system and solve the problem. Or take the failed predictions of city planners in Los Angeles who said the city would have a world-class public transit system in the 1940’s, so people wouldn’t have to drive their fancy cars everywhere. They were wrong not because public transit was inferior to cars, but because General Motors bought up all the rail lines and ruined them. 

As always, the best method for evaluating which predictions to pay attention to is the most laborious: look at each one individually and prioritize the evaluations that engage with the most specific context for that particular piece of technology. And we should remember that learning from the past is certainly worthy, but not every modern problem has an exact historical ancestor. (“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” is a quote that both Feifer and Anslow referenced when we spoke—a quote that, ironically, has often been misattributed to Mark Twain.) A friend once called this “the genealogy of ideas problem”—that the desire to find that historical precedent reduces for many to finding a historical precedent for something modern, and in doing so reduces a problem or issue down to only the constituent parts that link back to something in the past. This desire suggests that nothing is truly new, that no issues today have nuances that our historical counterparts haven’t seen, and that we can learn this lesson once, in aggregate, from all our past failures of imagination.