"Sabrina Kilian" <ski### [at] vtedu> wrote in message
news:4b1240c8$1@news.povray.org...
> somebody wrote:

> > But there's a deeper issue here as well besides rewriting history to fit
a
> > hollywood theme: If someone makes the correct (as proven later)
prediction
> > based on faulty reasoning and/or insufficient data, are those
contemporaries
> > laughing at him correct in doing so or not? With billions of people
> > expressing billions of opinions today, some are bound to make
predictions
> > that, to a future generation, may appear to be spot on. But if that
person,
> > at this time, is unable to provide supporting evidence or articulate a
> > reasoning for his prediction, I feel I would be correct at laughing at
him.

> What if that person got together some money and did some actual
> investigations into their predictions. By providing a testable
> hypothesis, statistically and scientifically sound testing, and found
> some results, either confirming, disproving, or offering no conclusive
> proof. Person takes confirmation as vindication, disproving as reason to
> rethink their stance, and the last as reason to refine their experiment.
>  Still laughable?

No, but that's a posteriori. Anyone may make a claim without good reason or
evidence, and I can justifiably laugh at him (for making a claim without
supporting reasoning or data). That's present time. That same person, in the
next 10 years, may actually work very hard to prove his claim, and let's say
it turns out to be correct (whether it was dumb luck or unexplainable genius
behind him making such a claim 10 years before he had any evidence, matters
not). But that won't change the fact that at the time he made the claim, he
did not know enough to make it.

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