Before I stumbled on Hawkins’ work, in 2007 before anyone announced, I predicted the 2008 election, and the only thing I got wrong was McCain beat Romney. I lost a dollar on that.
That was pretty wild because I didn’t try to do that. In 2008, I predicted everything that’s happening now, and two details were wrong, pandemic and Rump happened 4 years earlier than I thought. It turns out my innate, nearly pathological optimism interfered again there, because that pandemic was a bonus. Rump was supposed to use the four years from 2016 to 2020 to rouse the base more by going after Hilary the entire time, but the base was ready to go already. but in 2024 everything was back on track. Unfortunately.
It’s not all bad. I built an IT business by forecasting the future. And when I read the HTM paper, I knew Hawkins was absolutely right because could see the implications and the impact - and I knew he was right and I wasn’t imagining something because I read 2500wpm and I have read untold books on every subject I could find since the 7th grade when I found that out, like Hawkins did xeroxing books in the library, but up to 3 or 4 a day if I had the free time. Icould read a text once and not need to take it with me. The entire text book before any reading assignments. I read books I couldn’t understand because I knew from experience I would read another cook later that would tie it all together.
I’m a musician and when digital recording became a thing, I had already picked up a Radio Shack auto reverse reel to reel at Goodwill an converted it to a record 2 at once and play back all four. So I wanted to know if I could do that with digital audio, and of course not possible with 1/4” tape at 7-1/2” per sec. So what did I do? What Hawkins would do, but I wasn’t a student and had to read all the books at the Oregon State University library because I couldn’t check them out and couldn’t afford to xerox them. It told me why it wasn’t possible, but the rest of how it worked fell into place getting an AA in electronic in a 9 week class on 8086 assembly language, so I built a mono wavetable look up synth that booted bare metal on an XT because was too much of a load. It had to be less than 64k because the shareware assembler could only compile .COM files. I built a simple resistor ladder D/A converter and attached it to the parallel port. I created the waveforms and the screen display of them using graph paper, and F1 throgh F8 selected from 8 different ones. The home row is about an octave, and the Turbo button doubled the clock speed, raising it an octave. I used a ring buffer to handle the keypresses and it had “n-key rollover’“ where if you held down up to 16 keys at once, and released them one at a time it knew which note you played before that without without re-pressing a key. All that in about a month. It was the first program I ever wrote.
In high school I barely studied, and when I took the PSAT/NMQST I walked in stoned from smoking weed behind the home ec building. I ripped through the test - I loved taking tests, they were exciting in a weird way. I scored a SAT equivalent of 1530 and went back out and smoked some more weed (it was the 70s
) I couldn’t afford to go to college and when I was two credits short of graduating, I went got a job as a dishwasher instead of coming back for two PE credits.
I’m shmaht, but I always thought percentiles were like the grading curve, and 90% was an A, so 97% must be an A
so it didn’t mean much to me, and I couldn’t use it for anything. When I got my GED I took all five tests in the office at Oregon State while the person working was taking their lunch break. I was busy, I had things to do. Again, what a thrilling thing taking that test was. I still scored over 90%.
That’s not normal. I’m a mutant.
There’s a filed in psychology called Superforcasting, and they study people like me who can predict the future well beyond reandom chance. The one who was the best at the time I read it, not long after I doscovered Hakwins’ work, was a mechanic in the midwest who did it just by observing the world around him, and he did it better than our national intelligence agencies combined. While fixing people’s cars. In 2019 the CIA found out (I assume they were at least a little embarrassed, and had quietly checked him out because he knew things that he shouldn’t know at all) and the field was revived, it hadn’t caught on and was languishing until then.
From my perspective, this is the “meta level” of how the brain works, and it works just like everything else does, but the world model is far more complex and enormous. Monty can recognize an object with very few samples. Superforecasters recognize complex social structures and their behaviors. We (all of us) don’t predict the future with “pattern recognition”, we recognize objects in space with features and behaviors and those behaviors are how we predict the future. In this case the object is society. But it can also be technology, like in the case of Hawkins.
Knowing that everything happening right now would be happening right now and being completely unable to have any effect on that since 2008 has been a special kind of Hell where I kept hoping I was wrong, and I was, but it was because I was overly optimistic. Forecasting past this is not possible right now. I can do a few months because there’s too much chaos, and that’s why I was unable to see even vaguely what comes after this. Last week I predicted chemical weapons were about to be deployed. Fortunately I’m calm in a disaster even when the stress is high.
While I can’t know for sure what will happen after this, I can extrapolate what this project is doing now and know what the outcome of the project might be in 10 to 20 years it we survive the global existential threat that the US is at this very moment. This project is one of the few that has the potential to completely change the world in a positive way, and that’s not all that common today. So that’s why I’m here. Again, like Hawkins, when the shit hits the fan, I work on something that will improve the world around me. We can’t help ourselves. We’re mutants and we alter the world around us everywhere we go whether we intend to or not. In my case, no one on either side of my family is like me at all, and from stories there never were. Not mutants. Lucky them
oops, link Superforecaster - Wikipedia