DonFerrari said:
TheLastStarFighter said:
Orepheus said:
TheLastStarFighter said:
No, actually, it's not. When going forward, all that matters is the present. If sales pick up today for Wii U and slow down for PS4, the time up to this point will be completely irrelevant.
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If unicorns were real, what in gods name will make that happen? The third party support alone for ps4 makes this impossible, also, sales up to this point, historicla trends, market awareness do matter.
Wii-u is nealy 2 years old, there is nothing that is going to turn it around and nothing to make ps4 slow down, heck ps4 has not even hit a cheap mass market price yet.
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It's this train of thought that make most people poor predictors. Basing the future on the past.
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Are you serious??? I bet you would say that we study history for the giggles and fun facts not to understand better our own mistakes and predict how certain things better... you can only predict based on the past or else you would be just randomly choosing numbers or future facts. But maybe to you it makes more sense to ask a divinator or a time traveler to say what happened in the future then you can predict the future not based on the past but on the future.
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I study history and the believe that you need to look at the past to fix all our problems isn't widespread in the academic world anymore. Of course what you say still remains true, but only to a certain extent. You could compare history to research journalism. Knowing how to find the sources, transcribe/translate the sources, being able to think critically and weave everything together, being able to write on an academic level, etc are some of the important trades a historian learns. These things can be applied to contexts outside history, like journalism for example.
Another reason why people study history is because of curiosity of where we came from, in order to understand our present situation better. For example, in order to fully understand the volatile situation in the Middle-East you need to know your Islamic history, going as far back as Muhammad himself (even further actually).
