An interactive essay on forecasting: how humanity's famous predictions compared with what actually happened, and the patterns in how we get the future wrong.
▶ Open the live app · works on phone and laptop
- Hall of Fame & Shame: 24 famous predictions (flying cars, "Dow 36,000", Leicester at 5000-to-1…), each with what really happened and a source, filterable by sector, outcome and why it missed
- Think you'd have called it?: a predict-first game. Guess whether each prediction came true before the reveal, with a running calibration score
- The evolving crystal ball: a timeline of six forecasting eras, from oracles to machine forecasting
- Hope vs Doom: a chart of which sectors we're too optimistic about and which we catastrophize, computed from the dataset
- Predictability spectrum: from clockwork (eclipses) to black swans (markets, geopolitics), with the reason each domain sits where it does
- Forecast horizon: today's best forecasts for 2050 and 2100, each with a confidence level
- Sourced: every claim links to a reference; the written analysis lives in RESEARCH.md
- Light and dark themes
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no frameworks or build step. The data lives in data/*.js.