May 8, 2026

"Someone creates an X account, sets it to private, and posts hundreds of different predictions with every possible virus name and scenario imaginable."

"Then, once one event vaguely lines up with reality, they delete all the other failed predictions and leave only the 'correct' one visible."

Dr. Simon reveals one simple trick.

I'm glad I have a tag called "predictions."

32 comments:

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

The weird one is Fauci predicting it years ahead of the event and saying “during the next administration…”

Aggie said...

Sounds like an excellent job for an A.I. bot. I've long been having a niggling suspicion that they have actually been web-walking among us for longer than we think.

Old and slow said...

Reading the comments on that post, it does not appear to be the case for the tweet he references.

R C Belaire said...

Didn't Nostradamus use the same "trick?" I was told his wastebasket was full of crumpled drafts.

tim maguire said...

That's a lot of work for 5 minutes of internet fame. Some people have too much time on their hands.

RideSpaceMountain said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
RideSpaceMountain said...

@R C Belaire, his predictability models were even worse. Nostradumbass.

narciso said...

Its not really a prediction if you were actually working toward the goal

Wince said...

Amidst "hundreds of predictions"?

Hell, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Enigma said...

For upwards of 15 years, the software product "Recorded Future" has scanned media releases, public comments, and "chatter" about future events to somewhat effectively predict the near-term future. Here, doing it on an individual basis using brute force for professional prestige may be new.

https://www.recordedfuture.com/

Money Manger said...

It's a common hypothetical strategy for stock market newsletters. Target 10,000 investors, send half a note saying the market will be up next month, half that it will be down. At the end, repeat with the 5000 that where you happened to be right. After 5 cycles of this, send a subscription request to the 300+ marks where your prediction success is 100%, or 5 for 5. Watch the money come in.

rehajm said...

Back in the '80s one of my finance profs told of a brilliant career path for the morally challenged finance student- back when there wasn't interwebs there were investment newsletters, so he suggested you gather a large mailing list, half receiving a buy order on stock XYZ and the other half a sell order. Of the half with the wining prediction, repeat with stock PDQ, then the wining half with and ABC, and so on. Eventually you will have a small list of people hanging on your every utterance. Thin invite them to invest in your hedge fund...

rehajm said...

great minds...

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Thinking alike isn’t a definite indicator of greatness. But those of us who didn’t know this scam now know who did.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

And when co-conspirator Bill Gates also made the same forward looking remarks contemporaneously one begins to wonder how it has survived so long without an investigation coming to light.

gspencer said...

Suave Jack Cassidy did a variation of that on one of his appearances on the original Columbo, Now You See Him (1976).

Jamie said...

I also read a bunch of the comments, and - I am only a very casual user of X and therefore I don't know if either of the following is true, but - several pointed out that (a) there is a tool to detect deleted tweets and this guy doesn't have any, and (b) there is little meaningful security (i.e., Blockchain) around tweets and therefore it would be possible simply to change the date stamps if one had access. (b) seems like less work, for an X employee with a desire either to mess with people or to achieve the weird phenomenon I will dub "anonymous fame."*

* Yesterday I learned that my youngest has a friend whose name he and the rest of their friends in common don't know because all the person has identified himself by is his gamertag. My son says this guy(? But probably) is from Canada but didn't know Ottawa was the capital, which, you know, that might be plausible. But I was momentarily flummoxed by this "friendship."

Iman said...

You're gonna take a walk in the rain
And you're gonna get wet
(I predict)
You're gonna eat a bowl of chow mein
And be hungry real soon
(I predict)
Are my sources correct
(I predict)
They're gonna find the Queen is a man
But that Philip don't care
(I predict)
Lassie will prove that Elvis and her
Had a fleeting affair
(I predict)
Are my sources correct
Are my sources correct
Yes I know they're corect
(I predict)

h/t Mael Bros

n.n said...

Anthropogenic Stochastic Intelligence (ASI)

Joe Bar said...

Nah. It's all a scam.

Quayle said...

I was just gonna post about the trick that money manager describes. So ditto, money manager. Five successful predictions in a row and they’re ready to give you their life savings

Gusty Winds said...

Sad part is, you know liberals are rooting for the next scamdemic. That was their time of glory. Social media virtue signaling. Line dancing nurses at empty hospitals, still claiming to be "swamped." Masks were the new symbol of your moral being. Karen's calling the police on kids playing in parks. Shutting down beaches. And OMG the unnecessary school closures driven hardest by the Teachers Unions.

COVID was both the most totalitarian time in America I have experienced, as well as the DUMBEST. Proud to say I never took the clot shot.

Known Unknown said...

I've done this for the Cleveland Indians/Guardians baseball team winning the World Series and I've had to delete every tweet.

Pillage Idiot said...

My brother is a SEC-FINRA stock brokerage auditor, and says they have also seen that exact same scam. He said, if the scamsters are careful, it is not even illegal.

Step 1: Send out your market guidance for the S&P 500 via email to 10 million potential investors. Half say the market will go up, half say it will go down.

Step 2: At the end of trading, send out tomorrow's predictions to the 5 million investors that believe you correctly predicted the market movement.

After five days of "correct" predictions, you still have a pool of 300,000 people that believe you are a genius. You then send them all information on how to open an account at the brokerage to profit from this awesome ability.

bagoh20 said...

Predicting the future is one of those places where great minds and weak ones come closest together, so the greatest minds do the least of it.

Pillage Idiot said...

Sorry. Just went back to read the comments, and see multiple people have already posted that same scam.

As Homer Simpson would say, "Doooooh!"

bagoh20 said...

I have never trusted anyone to predict the future. All my worse investments were recommendations from "experts" at it.

Mary Beth said...

Grok confirmed that that account only made four posts, all were public, none deleted.

Someone could have created a thousand accounts and made different predictions on each. It doesn't need to be multiple predictions from one account.

The soothsayer post has a Community Note that says essentially the same thing as the Dr. Simon post. When I saw it, it didn't have enough votes to make it public.

Even if it's a false accusation, it's nice that Dr. Simon took some time out from his anti-Israel posts. Spread the wrongness around. One of the replies to his post wondered how soothsayer even knew about hantavirus. Must not be someone familiar with the American southwest.

Enigma said...

@Pillage Idiot: After five days of "correct" predictions, you still have a pool of 300,000 people that believe you are a genius. You then send them all information on how to open an account at the brokerage to profit from this awesome ability.

Given people's willingness to try marginal things, you'd not have to be 100% accurate. With just 55% to 60% accuracy many would fall for "has had an edge." This is all that the backward-looking Morningstar multi-year ratings do anyway -- trend lines persuade people into betting that outperformance will continue. They collect management fees no matter what.

Also consider cosmetics, herbal supplements, and prescription drugs with more side effects than benefits.

MadisonMan said...

Pillage Idiot, this was discussed in the book Innumeracy wherein someone sends Stock Market guesses to 64K people, 32k get it will rise, 32K get it will fall, the subsequent guesses (rise/fall) to 32K, 16K, 8K, 4K, 2K people, and then sending a letter to 1K asking for $$ because you've been shown to be right 7 straight times.

Nothing is new.

NMObjectivist said...

That reminds me of an episode on an old TV show. A man received predictions by mail. After a number came true, he began to bet on them. Things like what the market would do or what horse would win a race. After 10 correct predictions a man called him and said he couldn't benefit from his magical ability to make predictions so would the man please share the benefits with him. It turns out the man has sent a large number of predictions of A or B to people. He kept sending more predictions to the people who had the correct predictions - thus creating the illusion.

mikee said...
This comment has been removed by the author.

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