Selling Tomorrows

Google Searches Expose Our Hunger for Predictions

What can Google's search data reveal about our hunger to know today what will happen tomorrow? 

Using Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool, I examined the top 350 future-oriented keywords.  Combined, they represent 152,620,240 searches a month.  Here are four of the major trends uncovered.  

1.  We think about the future most often in December and least often in July.  The motivation behind this clockwork activity goes beyond New Year’s resolutions.  People are looking for predictions about their careers, spouses, industries and even countries. 

 

2.  Four industries are top of mind: One third of the 350 keywords focus on just four sectors -- Technology, Auto, Entertainment and Finance.  Anecdotally, we know that the concepts of technology and the future are often linked.  What's different now is we can measure the degree to which that’s true.  We also see the presence of sectors that aren’t as obviously linked to futurism. 

 

 

3. The only countries present in the data are the U.S., India and Pakistan. I’ll leave it to others to guess why that's the case, but what’s startling is the absence of searches for European, Asian and African nations. 

 

4. Psychics?  Really???  One in five future-oriented keywords reveal people looking for straight-out predictions. Together, they represent 34,889,400 searches a month!  That's intriguing at first blush, but the data quickly takes a dismaying turn.  Nearly everyone is looking to supernatural sources, like psychics and astrology, rather than rational ones grounded in science or professional forecasting. Maybe it's all in good fun looking up horoscopes, but still...99% is a big number.

Other interesting findings:

• Jobs: There are 482,100 searches a month for terms related to future careers
• Job security?  The term "future proof" is searched 18,100 times per month
• Trends:  “Future trends” is Google'd 74,000 times a month.  

How does this square with your expectations about how other people feel about the future?  Leave your comments below, and check out Google Trends and Google's Keyword tool and play around with the data.  If you see something interesting, please share!

 

 

Meteorologists Carefully Add Chaos to their Communications

In "The Weatherman is Not a Moron," Nate Silver gives a fascinating tour of how forecast models have evolved and delves into how uncertainty is communicated to the public.  

First up is the idea of modeling and an idea that Hari Selden himself would feel at home with. Snip:

"In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace postulated that the movement of every particle in the universe should be predictable as long as meteorologists could know the position of all those particles and how fast they are moving. Unfortunately, the number of molecules in the earth’s atmosphere is perhaps on the order of 100 tredecillion, which is a 1 followed by 44 zeros. To make perfect weather predictions, we would not only have to account for all of those molecules, but we would also need to solve equations for all 100 tredecillion of them at once."

Strikingly, it's the integration of the unknown into models that is making them more accurate. Like stock traders, meteorologists have begun to play the odds, acknowledging that they're an inherent part of the system.  

Unfortunately, communicating that uncertainty carries cultural baggage, motivating experts to hold back their full analysis. Private sector forecasters have a "wet" bias for predictions of rain, because the public is happy if it's sunny when rain is predicted, and angry if it rains when sun is forecast. In a more serious situation, Silver reports there was a storm in 1997 in Grand Forks North Dakota where the forecast's margin of error wasn't shared with the public.  The result?  Millions in damage that could have been averted through mitigation efforts like sandbagging.  

"The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty."

"Optimism Gun" Shoots Off Your Rose-Colored Glasses

Everyone's an optimist until they get shot in the head with a magnetic gun.  

But seriously, researchers at Universty College London have just published research that shows there is a part of the brain responsible for our "optimism bias."  That's the miscalculation that each of us makes about how bad things are more likely to happen to other people than to ourselves. 

Using a technique called "transcranial magnetic stimulation," researchers turned off a portion of the brain called the "left inferior frontal gyrus" which tracks information that is better than the person expected. The right portion handles information that is worse than expected.  The result?  Test subjects believed the chance of bad things happening to them increased to their rightful amount. 

As TheScientists notes, "Of course, it may not always be beneficial to suppress such natural biases. Unwarranted optimism can lead us to take unnecessary risks with our health or finances, but Sharot and Kanai noted that it could also be adaptive, by encouraging people to try new things or avoid the stress of potential illness or failure." 

Majority of People Who Predict They Won't Vote DO Vote

Talk about being poor predictors!  It turns out that 54.8% of people who tell posters that they don't think they'll vote, end up voting. And on the other side of the coin, 13.3% of those who say they are "almost certain" to vote, don't show up at the polls.  This matters a lot when it comes to predicting turnout of elections and it also reveals a type of prediction people often make about themselves and get wrong.

Tip of the hat to Politico for uncovering this gem. Here's the Hardvard study they source, "Why Bother Asking? The Limited Value of Self-Reported Vote Intention."