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I feel like I can predict the future personal trajectories of 2 out of 3 people under 25 given a decent signal like a few hundred tweets. This is very depressing. But the 1 in 3 I can’t predict give me hope.
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Ofc it would be Middle-Aged Malpractice to actually share these predictions. The only ethical position is to hope you’re wrong about all of them and stfu. Not just me btw. I’d guess 1/3 of 40+ types have a similarly tuned classifier. Basic qualification for middle management.
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Interesting that people *want* me to hazard actual predictions: if you’re in the predictable set it is by definition not a positive prediction (since it’s depressing to me) and knowing it actually increases probability I’ll end up being right.
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Rational under-25 attitude is to ignore 40+ predictions and hope all older pattern classifiers are wrong about you. The chances you’ll heed a negative prediction as a warning as opposed to perversely doubling down on the path as a fuck-you to oldie expectations are low.
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The "grumpy old man" metric. You kinda hope you aren't right, cause you want to believe you know way less about how the world works, but you kinda know you are. It's a great metric if you can share its insights with empathy and also be graceful when your wisdom becomes irrelevant
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I’ll share what I think puts people in unpredictable 1/3 though: paying attention to something new happening in the environment that is itself unpredictable. Humans are inherently predictable. What makes them unpredictable is paying attention to unpredictable non-human signals
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A 45y old looking at a 25y old seriously tracking a legit new thing is like a camera trying to run facial recognition on someone wearing one of those cyberpunk IR hats designed to blind cameras. Basic weakness in middle-aged classifier is it’s trained on 20y out-of-date samples
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You could write all your predictions down, and do what Mark Twain did: give instructions to wait til everyone in the book is dead (he used 100 years) and then publish it. I was going to put a link here from , but their website has too many ads and is really annoying.
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