We’ve all seen the articles – ’10 Times the Simpsons predicted the future with eerie precision!’. And people have a whole list of events which they can point to as being moments of precognition by the infamous adult animated series. President Donald Trump, the Higgs Boson, phones with screens on them, genetically modified fruit… the list goes on. But why does this happen? Are the creators time travellers or prophets? Or is there an explanation to it?
In March 2000, an episode of the Simpsons was released set in the far future in 2030 wherein Lisa, now President (and specifically dressed similar to Hillary Clinton), says; ‘As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump’. For many, this cemented the Simpson’s predictive power. And yet, things start to make more sense when you look at how long Simpsons has run…
The show was released 1989, consists of 33 seasons and 708 episodes. If a television show is left to run for long enough, it will become impossible for any other television show to not go through an idea which has done by the long running series. This is known as ‘Simpsons did it.’ Every idea has been done even before the Simpsons. When it comes to such TV shows like Family Guy or South Park, the likelihood of them repeating something Simpsons did increases.
But how does reality do what Simpsons does? Well, when someone creates something enough times and then lets all of time to keep going, there is bound to be a couple of hits. South Park, who coined the term ‘Simpsons did it’ also had a couple of hits, such as the Subway pedophilia scandal. And yet, we only hear of the instances in which these shows get something right. What about when they get it wrong?
For example – Lisa was specifically designed to look like Hillary Clinton. Whoever won the election, the Simpsons would have gotten one thing right and one thing wrong either way.This is called confirmation bias – we do not assess reality purely objectively. We often look for things which we want to be there, and then confirm our ‘knowledge’ afterward. Lets take one of the more ‘impressive’ predictions people quote.
In a 2010 episode, several characters made a Nobel Prize betting pool. The name Jagdish Bhagwati was circled. Next to him was Bengt R. Holmstrom, who actually won a prize in 2016. The Simpsons creators wrote down the people most likely to win the prize (20 total guesses) and then just showed the paper on screen. The circled name didn’t win the prize and the one name listed won it six years after the prize was won.
This starts to seem less and less impressive. Back to Trump. The Simpsons did a spoof of the fact that Trump did run a third party campaign in the year 2000 – the fact that Trump ran for President doesn’t seem all too bizarre now. And in other cases, the Simpsons just makes fun of random things/events, such as Ebola virus, and people will lose their minds over the alleged predictions. And Simpsons is just there to entertain…
It is statistically improbable for you to write as many predictions as possible and not have a single one come true. You can do it – look out for trends or themes in reality and write as many as possible. Then, let history do the work. You could become the next Nostradamus (who did the same thing, just trying to come off as ‘professional). But this is it – the Simpsons predicts the future is just folklore for a modern age.
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