Whether the Weather Is Fair

“It’s raining,” I told my mom.

“No, it doesn’t start raining until later,” she replied. She was looking at the forecast on her laptop. I was looking out the window.

I’ve had a near identical interaction with other people. And on a daily basis I hear people say things like, “it’s going to get up to 80 tomorrow,” or “the snow will stop around 9” or “it’s going to be cloudy all week next week.”

The salient feature here is matter-of-fact statements about the future without knocking on wood, opening the back door to uncertainty, or paying the least bit of homage to the spiraling, prediction-defying chaos that constitutes our universe. As though the future were the latest thing people could own. Or rent access to as a subscriber to this or that app.

As I began noticing this tendency more and more, I started to see how people would revise their confident descriptions of the future as their favored weather app changed its predictions, stating the new future with the same certainty, and insisting that the new forecast was the same as the old forecast, that they hadn’t changed their tune by a single note. I’ve practically gotten into duels insisting that people are editing their memory of the future. (Truth: I wish I got in more duels.)

It’s like Stalinist revisionism projected forwards. Rain? There was never any rain in the forecast. Zinoviev? Who’s Zinoviev?

Faced with this distressing trend, I did what any normal person would do: I started a file where I would record forecasts, and then when the actual, in-the-flesh weather arrived, I’d record if the forecast was accurate or inaccurate. I periodically repeated the process over the following 10 months.

And boy do I have things to share!

Weather forecasts were only accurate about 50% of the time! Now, I don’t have any degrees in statistical analysis or modelling, and only 107 data points. However, the sample was random and impartial: I randomly chose days to record forecasts and I included all my prediction/result data points. I took predictions from 3 different apps that people swore by (including the standard Apple app and Weather.com) as well as the National Weather Service.

Total nerds can get more info on the numbers at the very end of this newsletter.

So… does this mean that I’m a flat-earther who doesn’t believe in science?