Most of the future is the present continued, which anyone attentive can see

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the puzzle dissolves once forecasting is understood properly. Very little of what happens is a break with what came before. Technologies that seem to arrive suddenly have usually been in development, in prototype or in specialist use for years; political figures who appear from nowhere have normally been visible in public life for a long time; and consolidation, rising costs and shifting tastes all move in directions that are legible well before their endpoints arrive. A writer who reads widely and pays attention to the present is therefore not guessing at all, but extrapolating. On this account the show was doing something much less mysterious than prophecy. Satire works by taking a tendency that is already visible and pushing it to an absurd conclusion for comic effect. That method is forecasting by construction, because the joke requires identifying the direction of travel before exaggerating it. When the world later arrives at the exaggerated point, the joke looks prescient, but the underlying operation was simply naming a tendency that was already in motion. Proponents add that the reputation for difficulty attaches to the wrong kind of question. Forecasting precise timing is genuinely hard, and so is forecasting real discontinuities. Forecasting direction is not, and almost all of the examples people cite are direction rather than timing: that a kind of technology would become ordinary, that a sort of public figure would gain power, that a commercial tendency would go further. Getting the direction right while saying nothing about when is a much weaker achievement than it appears, and it is available to anyone willing to look carefully at the present rather than at the future.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who reject this argument hold that it understates how badly direction is forecast in practice. Professional forecasters with resources, incentives and expertise get directional questions wrong routinely, and critics argue that a method available to anyone attentive would not produce such a record. They also object that the argument explains too little: if extrapolation from visible trends were sufficient, the apparent predictions would be evenly distributed across commentators and programmes rather than concentrated in one body of work. A further objection concerns the examples themselves, several of which involve conjunctions of particulars rather than broad directions, and a method that only yields direction cannot account for a match on particulars. Critics also note that distinguishing a visible tendency from a retrospective story about one is far harder than the argument allows, since trends become obvious mainly after their endpoints are known.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics hold that directional forecasting is in fact done badly by professionals with resources and incentives, so a method available to any attentive reader would not produce the record. [Rejecting P2] If extrapolation were sufficient, apparent predictions would be spread evenly across commentators rather than concentrated in one body of work. [Rejecting P3] Several cited examples involve conjunctions of particulars rather than broad directions, which a direction only method cannot deliver. [Rejecting C] Forecasting is harder than the argument allows, so ease of extrapolation does not dissolve the puzzle.