Prediction: Wii U will sell under 40 million units

[Zod95]

Teeqoz said:

Zod95 said:

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.

If that's the case, I agree that now his prediction of less than 35M is pretty useless, although not stupid (since it is correct and, I guess, not consensual - I bet there still are some Nintendo die hard fans expecting more than that).

"About" is indeed imprecise. But "less than" is pretty clear. Either the number is lesser or it's not. Where's the imprecision?

Yet, when you say "about 0 units" I know that 0.4 (if it could exist) would be about 0. 1.35 would already be about 1. When a game sells thousands or millions of units, there's no way it can be "about 0 units" (since your scale is in "units", not "billion units"). I think that's logical.

 

PS: Portugal is the european champion!!! I can't believe it! First title ever!!