Another of the big news stories on CNN is somene has a quiz to predict when you will die. I can always count on CNN for an opportunity to feel superior as I wrote one almost forty years ago.
This is hardly a feat of major intellectual accomplishment as it was one of the first programs I ever wrote and it was in IBM BASIC, an almost perfect language which was butchered into total incoherence over a period of years thereafter.
The program is an easy thing and asks obvious questions such as do you smoke, do you take risks, are you married, etc, etc. Points were added or subtracted depending on the responses. That in combination with the person's age permitted a completely half-ass prediction of death but one which nevertheless came from a computer and looked serious ...
So ...
People lined-up for it.
The point of the exercise is the result doesn't matter as the only way a fortune teller goes wrong on something like that is if you die too soon and then you can't complain anyway. The result doesn't have to be correct, it only has to seem credible. They've been telling the same fortune for centuries but nothing on the planet will tell you the Future by playing Twenty Questions with it.
It was quackery then and it's quackery now.
This is hardly a feat of major intellectual accomplishment as it was one of the first programs I ever wrote and it was in IBM BASIC, an almost perfect language which was butchered into total incoherence over a period of years thereafter.
The program is an easy thing and asks obvious questions such as do you smoke, do you take risks, are you married, etc, etc. Points were added or subtracted depending on the responses. That in combination with the person's age permitted a completely half-ass prediction of death but one which nevertheless came from a computer and looked serious ...
So ...
People lined-up for it.
The point of the exercise is the result doesn't matter as the only way a fortune teller goes wrong on something like that is if you die too soon and then you can't complain anyway. The result doesn't have to be correct, it only has to seem credible. They've been telling the same fortune for centuries but nothing on the planet will tell you the Future by playing Twenty Questions with it.
It was quackery then and it's quackery now.
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