Webbot predictions, right or wrong ?

TalkieWalkie

Don't shoot the messenger
Lots of talk in certain circles recently about this webbot program being able to predict major events. Your're thoughts on it are appreciated. Here is some info on it.

Web Bot, or the Web Bot Project, refers to an Internet bot software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. It was created in 1997, originally to predict stock market trends.The creator of the Web Bot Project, Clif High, along with his associate George Ure, who call themselves "The Time Monks", keep the technology and algorithms largely secret and sell the predictions via the website halfpasthuman.com

Web Bot is a very sophisticated system. High and Ure say that the Web Bot works by using a form of the Wisdom of Crowds, with spiders that search the internet for about 300,000 keywords with emotional context and record the preceding and following words to create a "snapshot." The technology is claimed to be able to examine the collective unconscious and be able to predict catastrophic events 60 to 90 days in advance.

Claimed hits

The Web Bot is claimed to have predicted several events prior to them occurring, most notably the September 11 attacks and the 2003 Northeastern United States blackout. However, many believe the predictions are vague and, at best, pseudoscientific.

• September 11 attacks - In June 2001 Web Bot predicted that a catastrophic event would occur within the next 60–90 days.
• 2001 anthrax attacks
• American Airlines Flight 587
• Space Shuttle Columbia disaster - In January of 2003 the web bots were going on and on about a "maritime disaster"
• Northeast Blackout of 2003
• 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
• Hurricane Katrina and its devastation
• Dick Cheney hunting incident
• BP Oil Spill

Misses

• A massive earthquake in Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest was predicted to occur on 12 December 2008.
• A "global coastal event" in mid-2009, which Ure and High said that they recommended people to stay away from coastal areas.
• A complete collapse of the US dollar beginning in 2009.
• The US dollar completely collapses, or Israel bombs Iran. In reaction to this crisis, administration of U.S. President Barack Obama would have been thrown into major chaos ten days later.

Future predictions

• July 11th, 2010 - The web bot predicts building of tension language, leading to the events of November 8th. [15]

• November 8th, 2010 - The web bot warns of a big tipping point, possibly World War III.[16]

• Major catastrophe in 2012 - The Web Bot has gained most of its notoriety for contributing to the 2012 phenomenon by predicting that a cataclysm will devastate the planet in the year 2012, possibly a reversing of Earth's magnetic poles or a small series of nuclear attacks leading up to a major attack during the year. The prediction does not necessarily call for a complete end of the world.[17][18][19][20]

The following come from the Web Bot Project Blogspot report on a radio interview with High and Ure:

• No warfare between Israel and Iran, at least not until November.
• Six very large earthquakes are yet to come during the rest of 2010.
• A major tipping point will occur between November 8th – 11th, 2010, followed by a 2-3 month release period. This tipping point appears to be US-centric, and could be a dramatic world-changing event like 9-11 that will have rippling after-effects. The collapse of the dollar might occur in November.
• From July 11th, 2010 onward, civil unrest will take place, possibly driven by food prices skyrocketing, and the devaluation of the dollar.
• No exact information on the December 14th missile launch (beginning of World War III) has been confirmed, but the predictions show it may happen.
• A second depression, triggered by mass layoffs, bankruptcies, and the popping of the "derivatives bubble," will see people moving out of cities.
• After March 2011, the revolution wave will settle down into a period of reformation.
• A "data gap" has been found between early 2012 running through May 2013. One explanation is that "our civilization gets knocked back to a pre-electronic state," such as brought about by devastating solar activity.
• A new benign form of capitalism will emerge during 2017-2020.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Bot

seamus

Funny how almost all of the predictions are
a) Negative, and
b) Based around the US.

Why didn't it predict the terrorist bombings in London (five years ago today, in fact)?

Why didn't it predict the IRA's cessation of all hostilities?

Why didn't it predict the Bali bombings?

Or more mundane but equally significant things such as scientific discoveries or public events which had a relatively large effect such as the launch of the iPhone?

If you look at even one of their claimed predictions - the New York power outage in 2003 - they are claiming that they successfully predicted, despite in fact having predicted that it would be a major terrorist incident. In reality, what we had was a minor technical incident which was resolved without any major effect on the public within 24 hours.

The idea behind crawling the web and examining the language to try and identify trends or possible news before they hit the big-time is very much a good one.
However, what these guys are clearly doing is gathering a whole pile of words, examining the output, then adding in a dash of hocus-pocus in order to try and convince themselves that these words relate in some way to some cataclysmic event that will primarily affect the United States.

humanji

I think it's funny how it says that WW3 is likely to happen, then there'll be a data blackout possibly caused by civilisation being brought back to a pre-electronic state, and that's followed by benign capitilism. I'd have thought that the survivors would be eating each others brains at that point, not working out how to profit from consumerism.

All in all, I see it as being no different to any other predictions; gibberish until after the fact when it can be mapped to an occurance. If it could actually predict the future, then it's largely useless because it's so vague.

RGDATA!

are there any links to the claimed hits? i.e. the actual text of what was predicted and when it was predicted?
the links in the original post only take me to the wikipedia page for 9/11 etc

off the bat though - as far as I am aware the 'wisdom of crowds' refers to the idea that the mean of a number of estimates to the solution of a problem can yield an answer very close to the actual answer.

so, if you had a jar of jelly beans and asked a roomful of people guess how many beans were in the jar, the average answer should approach the actual answer, according to the theory of the wisdom of crowds.

as far as i know though, the wisdom of crowds requires each member of the crowd to be focussed on the same problem, so i don't see how it would apply to this case, where they supposedly have some bot track what keywords people are using for internet searches. people in general, as they go about their internet searches, are not focussed on predicting the future.

in other words, i don't really see how the wisdom of crowds comes into it, other than to dress up the claims with some sort of reference to a vaguely related interesting concept.
derren brown did the very same thing recently in the trick where he had his volunteers guess the lotto numbers.

the predictions it makes for the future are predictably vague and open to reinterpretation:
"Six very large earthquakes are yet to come during the rest of 2010."
(what's a very large earthquake? some particular measurement on the richter scale, or large in terms of disruption and damage caused? if there are only five earthquakes will they say - "we were completely wrong" or will they say "hey, five out of six is remarkably close"? if there are 20 earthquakes will they claim this referred to the six largest ones and was bang on?)

"A new benign form of capitalism will emerge during 2017-2020."
can they explain what a benign form of capitalism is? did the machine just spit out the word benign and we have to wait to see what form this new version of capitalism takes?

etc etc.

i love thinking about this stuff, but IMHO it's a load of bunk

My name is URL

It's an ingenious money making scam by those selling the reports, simple as that really. People add 2+2 together after the event and come up with 4, but looking at it closer you'll see that one of those 2's is actually undefined until an event happens

Dont mind all that...who's gonna win the world cup?

RGDATA!

we already have an octopus for that