The Time-Stamped Wish: A Term and Its Limits

The time-stamped wish is the name Hoax and Hindsight gives to one way of reading an old prediction: as a record of what the forecaster's own time hoped for and feared. A prediction carries a date, so it can be set beside the circumstances of that date. The term is an analytical figure of speech for a reading, not a definition of what predictions are, and it does not claim that every forecast is a disguised wish.

How the reading works

A forecast says something about the future it describes and something about the present it came from. Scoring deals with the first part: each item is checked against what happened, under the Hindsight score rules. The time-stamped wish deals with the second. It asks which hopes or fears of the forecaster's own years the forecast expresses, and what the period sources say about those hopes and fears.

The two are kept apart. A forecast's score does not change because of what the reading finds, and the reading does not depend on whether the forecast came true. A missed forecast can be as revealing about its time as a hit.

When the term applies

The time-stamped wish applies only when the page can point to a specific hope or fear in two places: in the wording of the forecast itself, and in other sources from the same period that show the hope or fear was current. Both are cited. A general sense that a forecast sounds optimistic, or that its period was anxious, is not enough.

When it does not apply

• Technical extrapolation. A forecast worked out from measurement and calculation, such as Edmond Halley's prediction of a comet's return, is a test of a method, not a picture of a wished-for world. The term is not used for it.
• Too little context. If the text is too short, or too little is known about who wrote it and for whom, the forecaster's motives cannot be read with any confidence, and the term is left out.
• Lines that are not predictions. The famous claim that everything that can be invented has already been invented is a question of where the words came from, not a forecast to score or read; the site traces its source instead.

Where this site uses the term

Applies to some items

• The Ladies' Home Journal forecasts of 1900: the items on cheap trips from the suburbs and on ready-cooked meals that make a hired cook unnecessary, which answer a serial in the same issue about a suburban couple who cannot find a cook, and the item on arrests for food left open to the air, which answers a spice advertisement in the same issue that warns of adulteration. The other items are scored and left at that.

Applies to one item

• Albert Robida's picture of life in the 1950s: only the item on electric life wearing people out, a fear that Max Nordau's Degeneration, in its English translation of 1895, shows was current in the 1890s. The item itself stays unscored, because the book gives no measure by which it could be checked.

Counterexamples

• Halley's Comet: Halley's forecast is a sum worked from orbits. Beyond credit for the discovery, nothing in his text speaks of a hope or fear about the world.
• The line that everything that can be invented has been invented: it is not a prediction, and the site traces its source instead.

Why the term exists

The site holds that an old forecast is most useful for what it shows about the forecaster's own present, and that whether it came true matters least. The time-stamped wish puts that view to work under stated conditions, so it can be checked and argued with.

The site's two other terms are the wish-shaped fake and courtroom folklore.