# 50. Self-delusion - the manipulation of self ## 50.5. Methodology/Refinements/Sub-species ### 50.5.17. Recency bias This is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observed in the recent past will continue into the future. Predicting the future in the short term, even for highly changeable events like the weather or the stock market, based on events in the recent past, may work fine most of the time. However, predicting the future in the long term according to what has recently occurred has been shown to be no more accurate than flipping a coin. This is especially true in fields like meteorology, demographics, economics, investment, technology assessment, futurology, and organisational planning. Nonetheless, the general public is constantly exposed to poorly formulated predictions based on data from the recent past. These predictions very often turn out to be catastrophically wrong. Looking back over the last 30 years, few of the really large events that affected the world have been accurately predicted; for instance the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring, Global Warming, the rise of the internet, the wars of the Middle East, etc. Why do we make such poor predictions and why does the public believe these dodgy forecasts? Recent events and trends are much easier to remember and discern than either events in the distant past or unknown events that will occur in the future. So, rather than do the hard work of studying the long term past, we tend to use recent events to make our predictions. It is easier. But we also refuse to accept that many areas of human interest are beyond our ability to predict at levels better than chance. So, because of the difficulties in making accurate long-term predictions based on long term historical data and trends, the public is fed a poor quality diet of fairly random attention seeking headlines, few of which actually represent reliable predictions of the economic, social, technological or political future. Apparently, we even find it hard to make accurate predictions of our own population growth, despite the fact that we have a wealth of fairly accurate historical data to work with. So we lurch from doom predictions of global starvation to demographic time bombs, predicting catastrophic population decline. Amazingly, these entirely contradictory arguments are dished out to us simultaneously with no apparent embarrassment by the media. Regarding population issues, the contradictory conclusions are shamelessly used by a politically manipulative press to justify particular short-term political agendas, such as legalising GMO crop products to feed the starving, or delaying the retirement age of workers to maintain the creaking social welfare system. So we may be sure that the motivation driving these predictions is entirely political, wholly short-term, and based on demographic predictions of very dubious quality. Indeed, the predictions are no more than politically motivated statements, often designed to frighten us. They should not really be given the grand title of "prediction". The recency bias of the general public makes the selling of these "end of nose" projections much easier for the manipulator, because everyone knows the population is ageing - they can see it with their own eyes.