The Most Impressive Prediction of All Time
I've always been impressed when people can truly predict the future. Perhaps it's from my years working as a professional investor at hedge funds, but when someone makes a concrete, explicit prediction— particularly one that is highly contrarian and non-consensus at the time (which is the only way to make truly outsized returns in the market)— I sit up and take notice. The world is filled with people who try to indicate after the fact that they, of course, knew and predicted some outcome would happen, and that it was even obvious at the time.
But usually you will find if you do more digging that, for every such claim, there are often 3+ more predictions they made that turned out to be totally false. Or, they predicted something which, at the time they actually took an explicit stand that could be objectively judged later on, their prediction was already obvious to most people and "priced in" to the market. Or, that they made an impossibly vague and imprecise prediction, with lots of hedging and qualifications, to cover a much larger range of possible outcomes (making the predictions much less actionable).
Of course, it also isn't so impressive if the thing you are predicting is not of any practical importance in the world, such as predicting ahead of time that a particular indie musician will become a lot more popular in future years. A rough proxy to how practically important a prediction is might be to pose the question "How much money could you make based on that prediction being correct if you had control over a large pool of capital?" Although even that is limited, since it generally requires that you make predictions over a short enough time horizon that it is going to be practically actionable in the market.
