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Teeqoz on 10 July 2016
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Zod95 said:
Teeqoz said:

Of course his statement is correct. I didn't say it was wrong. Just that it's a useless prediction. It's like if I were to say "I predict that Pokemon Sun/Moon will sell about 0 units"

 

People would call me out on such a silly prediction, but if I wanted to, I could say something like this: "Hah, I was right. Rounding down to the closest billion, we end up with 0".

I mean, I'd still be correct. But I'd understand why people would call me out regardless, because it's a stupid statement.

No, you wouldn't. You'd only be correct if you said it would sell about 0 billion units.

Moreover, pleople use "more than" or "less than" when they're sure about the lower / upper limit (respectively) but they're unsure about the other limit. It's totally legitimate. When many people were saying WiiU would sell 100M, 150M, 200M, to claim it wouldn't sell more than 40M was not stupid / useless at all. On the contrary, it was a bold statement that clearly marked a line of thought.

This wasn't in relation to Man-Bear-Pig's prediction, but a different user in this thread that yesterday said less than 35 million. Another user then asked him why he predicted such a high number now, when it's obvious the Wii U will come nowhere close to 35 million. He said that he "only predicted *less* than 35 million, so he would still be correct". My point was that relying on ambiguous wording and semantics only to claim your prediction is correct even when your prediction clearly is terrible is silly and removes the whole point of predicting. And I indeed think that predicting today that the Wii U will do less than 35 million is a useless prediction, even if it's "correct".

 

The same is true for my "about 0". Since you can't possibly now what I mean by "about", I could indeed say that 10 million is "about zero". After all, if you have a perspective of, let's say, a Googleplex, 10 million and 0 are in the same neighborhood of numbers, which is what "about" means in relation to number quantities. Hence why, when using imprecise words like "about", "less than" or "more than" while making predictions have to be accompanied by common sense. You can predict "Wii U will sell less than 35 million" today, like the user this discussion was about did, and the prediction is correct but the prediction is also terrible. Don't get me wrong though, at the time Man-Bear-Pig made his prediction, it was a very good prediction.