Please some explain this to me

[theprof00]

famousringo said:

theprof00 said:

This is getting way too much in depth. I asked that first question rhetorically, of course there will be someone that does predict it, but among the rather large majority of people, nobody could possibly have guessed correctly. (Like you said, even he doesn't completely jump in the water. He estimated, and saw how things could work, but was not someone who said it will work.)

The quantum physics things is where things get sticky. Most of it is based completely on past results and assumptions, none of it is concretely proven, and the science itself deals in things that can almost never be proven, or at least not within our lifetimes. Belief in something that cannot be proven? Sounds like faith to me.

 

 And you're confused again. You don't see the distinction between proof and evidence. Proof exists almost exclusively in mathematics and logic, while evidence is where we get most of our useful knowledge from. None of our physics are proven, they just have a large body of evidence supporting them. That doesn't mean that our acceptance that physics theories are largely correct is faith. We have a lot of evidence to back it up.

People who predicted Wii's failure looked at market share and brand power and left it at that. The few who predicted Wii's success looked at a wider body of evidence. Business theories like blue ocean and disruption. I disagree with your assertion that evidence is useless in predicting the future. A person who looks at more evidence before making a prediction will tend to be more accurate than somebody who throws darts at a sheet of random numbers.

I'm not asking for proof that this generation will last ten years, because I know that nobody can give me that. I'm asking for evidence, and so far, I've been the only person to put some on the table.

This is why I'm saying this is getting too in depth. Lets scrap this whole "proof" and "evidence" argument for the moment, because at first I was merely trying to demonstrate how nothing can be completely proven.

My original point was that you said things were not going to change unless "magic" happened. You said it in response to some dude saying something like "sony knows stuff and they will win". A good battle to fight, but yes you are talking in absolutes because magic is not real.

Him: sony will win
You: No they won't

I'm just pointing out what you are doing.

You then back up your statement by stating previous trends. Then, I say that evidence only matters to whichever side you look at it from. Then I made the quantum physics analogy, so let's pick back up there.

You can pretty much show anything from looking at certain slices of data. Who predicted that Nintendo would use Blue Ocean theory? Who would have thought that SMG would be such a groundbreaking game 4 years ago? Who would've thought that Wii fit would one of the top selling games before the wii came out? These are my points. I'm not talking about "Who would have known that the Wii would be successful?" but I'm talking about "Who would've thought that Nintendo would try something like the Wii"

I'm talking about unestablished data or even just simply, poor data.

Now, the reason I am talking about unestablished data is because the very first objection I had to your statements was that you cannot predict a trend using only video game history. I did not mention it but maybe I should have. It is far too short a time and with very little data to make any accurate prediction. Stats and theory work very well because they are repeatable and have vast amounts of data.

Obviously you can use established theory and  statistics to see what might happen in the future, but you cannot predict what will exactly happen between now and then.

Anything, really, anything can happen, and to think to the contrary is a little blind. Even though it is well supported, even you showed how your "predictor" did not fully stick with his prediction. All anything can have is varying degrees of potential.