@johnwehrle It's on my radar, though that radar is rather crowded ....

As for fringe / cultish things: there is a long history of such schemes existing Largely To Separate Rich Idiots From Their Money, and it turns out that you can also find a through line through much cultish-thinking generally that it's a #MakeMOneyFast scheme.

All the more so if there is #InsanelyComplexReasoning behind the core notions, in which we find again that #SmartPeopleAreMoreEasilyFooled. I've been meaning to mention #Kant and his #CritiqueOfPureReason in this thread before, so let's do it now. If what Kant showed is that #reason is very often inferior to #epmiricism, that is direct #evidence and #experience, then the field of #GlobalCatastrophicRisk, for all the reasons (ahem, go with me here, please) given above is absolute fucking catnip because there can be no definitive evidence.

That's the fundamental problem of forecasting, prediction, and/or prophecy: it's inherently non-empirical. At best you can point to a track record of past successes, though that has some obvious issues:

• Sufficiently vague / subjective predictions that judging is a crapshoot. A/K/A the Nostradamus and/or Cold Reading problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading (I suspect that much the success of current LLM Generative AI models has foundations here.)

• The Stock Picker's Scam: Find 1,024 marks, send each a stock pick prediction, half saying it goes up, half down. Whichever proves correct, repeat the mailing to the remaining 512, then 256, then 128, then 64. Finally offer your next set of predictions for some fee to the final 32. Each of those 32 has just seen a record of five perfect predictions. What they don't see are the 992 others who received incorrect predictions. So a full prediction history is required.

Beyond that, as noted above, similarities, mechanisms, mathematical foundations (e.g., thermodynamics), etc., are the best guides we have.