My friends are (were???) infallible

I have a bunch of friends who are incredibly psychic geniuses, able to make predictions with 100% accuracy every time they look at a situation. I’d ask them for stock market tips, but there’s just one catch.

They are only 100% accurate at predicting the past.

I’m not sure how they plan to make their fortunes with this skill, but they are very, very proud of it and ready to show off their talents with minimal or zero prompting.

For example, it’s pretty clear by now that all the school closings during 2020-21 did a number on student test scores, but what would have happened if schools had stayed open? There are so many possibilities here that it’s almost overwhelming.

1. Would more children have carried the virus home and killed more of their parents?
2. Would all those newly orphaned children have seen their test scores plummet as they dealt with their depression?
3. Would more teachers have been infected and unable to teach, so classes would have been canceled regardless?
4. Would more kids have contracted Covid and ended up missing class anyway?
5. Would school buses have burned up so much fuel that inflation would have hit in 2020 instead of 2022?

I’ve tried to figure it all out, but I really couldn’t tell you what would have happened in an alternate universe. As Dionne Warwick liked to say, that’s what friends are for.

And my friends aren’t just geniuses about school closings. Elections, investments, invasions…you name it…they know with absolute certainty the exact details of everything that would have happened if what actually happened hadn’t actually happened to happen.

That’s the great thing about predicting the past. No matter what claims get made, they can never be disproven. Until Doc Brown works out all the kinks in the flux capacitor, there is no way to relive the moments and test their hypotheses.

I would never want to suggest that, just maybe, their predictions (post-dictions???) are simply assumptions based on existing biases. That would make me an unsupportive friend. Still, just for fun, I’d like to watch them make a prediction about something that hasn’t happened yet and see how they do.

They might fail on a few of their outlooks, but they’d be hard pressed to underperform all the pollsters and political pundits who missed the mark on the 2022 mid-term elections. Also the 2020 elections and the 2016 elections and the economy and inflation and…you get the idea.

There’s something to be said for making predictions about the past instead of gambling on the future. Nobody can prove us wrong, we never need to update our claims, and postdictions require no research or proof. The only downside is that nobody is willing to pay for a prediction about the past, while all the pollsters who failed miserably for the past decade are making new predictions for 2024, and getting paid for their efforts.

Of course, we all could have predicted that one.

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