Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean to say this directly contradicted anything you said. It just felt like a good reference that might be helpful to you or other people reading the thread. (In retrospect, I should have said that and/or linked it in response to the mention in your top-level comment instead.)
(Also, personally, I do care about how much effort and selection is required to find good retrodictions like this, so in my book “I didn’t look up the data on Google beforehand” is relevant info. But it would have been way more impressive if someone had been able to pull that off in 1890, and I agree this shouldn’t be confused for that.)
Re “it was incorrect by an order of magnitude”: that seems fine to me. If we could get that sort of precision for predicting TAI, that would be awesome and outperform any other prediction method I know about.
Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean to say this directly contradicted anything you said. It just felt like a good reference that might be helpful to you or other people reading the thread. (In retrospect, I should have said that and/or linked it in response to the mention in your top-level comment instead.)
(Also, personally, I do care about how much effort and selection is required to find good retrodictions like this, so in my book “I didn’t look up the data on Google beforehand” is relevant info. But it would have been way more impressive if someone had been able to pull that off in 1890, and I agree this shouldn’t be confused for that.)
Re “it was incorrect by an order of magnitude”: that seems fine to me. If we could get that sort of precision for predicting TAI, that would be awesome and outperform any other prediction method I know about.