Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Extrapolating the Future

Right wing nuts extrapolate this graph and run around screaming with their hair on fire that the US will be "eaten alive" by inflation by the crazed policies of Obama which have clearly unleashed a torrent of inflation into the economy:

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Left wing nutes extrapolate this graph and run around screaming with their hair on fire that the UK will be "turned to scorched earth" by the global warming caused by a failure to immediately stop all emissions of CO2:

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I think the fanatical right and the fanatical left deserve each other. Both camps look at innocuous data and extrapolate it into a doom-and-gloom scenario that requires extraordinarily drastic and immediate action.

I have a simple rule-of-thumb for the future: it will mostly be a lot like today. Sure there are trends but if they are real trends then they can be spotted by an ordinary person looking at a simple, honest graph.

But of course there are graphs put out by the fanatics...

The right wing inflation fear mongers would show you:

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The left wing global warming fear mongers would show you:

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