I Predict....

A few days ago I was checking the maltese Times website for updates to the war in Libya. As always, the most entertaining part is the comments, which triggered off this blogpost.

For those who aren't familiar with the quality of the comments on that website, imagine this - You put 1000 monkeys with typewriters in a room, however 33% of the monkeys are political zealots, 33% of them are religious xor anti-religious zealots, and 33% are uninformed or just plain stupid. The rest are normal. Note that these sets are not disjoint.

Anyhoo, on an article about the War in Libya, two different people posted two different Nostradamus prophecies which appeared to predict what would happen. Now this gave me some thought, why are there still people around that believe him?

This raises a number of problems with believing predictions or prophesies -

1. You are assuming that the predictor has enough cosmic knowledge to simulate/model the cosmos enough to make the prediction
1b. You are asserting a fatalist universe and denying the existance of free will
2. You don't know anything about probabilities
3. Prophesies can be interpreted in different ways generally - this adds onto 2.

So, I'm not going to go into 1 and 1b too much, I will leave that for a future blogpost.

2 is quite the kicker really. I did some wikipedia research on Nostradamus. Apparently he died in 1556, and predicted what I understand to be around 950 units. So you would assume the probability that he was right in at least 1 of them over the past 450 years should surprise no-one. Even if there was only one way of interpreting each prophecy, the probability of a particular event happening is very large, especially over 450 years.

Now 3 I decided to show using a slightly humorous method. I thought of some text I could bring up which is written in a 'prophetic' style and which has no predictions or nothing to do with current events. After some thought I decided upon the Book of Mozilla. For those who don't know what that is, its a humorous long-term joke which the firefox developers put quotes from in their software (about:mozilla), it details events about Firefox in an elaborate manner.

Anyhow, I chose this interesting quote:

"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children"

I will now proceed to interpret this piece as having to do with the current Libyan civil war.

Mammon is personification for Greed. Being a dictator for 40 years in an oil rich country is greedy. Since the libyan people were using the old flag which gaddafi had removed, its 'the beast reborn'. Its spreading over the Earth through the UN resolution, and the numbers are large enough. They cunningly took over half of Libya. The rest of the prediction is the future, where the 'sacred words' are the promises of freedom.

See? And you throught that that piece was about Netscape, IE6 and Microsoft. Foolish Mortals.

Llama