The Dates That Passed

There is no scoreboard here

Every date in the register above has passed and nothing predicted for it happened. That's how the entries were chosen, so counting hits and misses would be a tautology with a tone attached.

The column worth reading is the last one. What did the people who made the claim do the following morning? Those responses vary, they fall into a small number of recognisable kinds, and they're far more informative than the failures.

The commonest, by a wide margin, is that a new date was set.

Disconfirmation is not what ends a movement

This is the counter-intuitive finding and it's been documented since the 1950s.

In 1954 three social psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, joined a small Chicago group expecting a flood on 21 December and a rescue by spacecraft. They were in the room when the night passed. What they recorded wasn't collapse. The group's leader announced that the cataclysm had been called off because of the faith of those gathered, and the members, who had mostly kept quiet until then, started proselytising for the first time. The account was published as When Prophecy Fails, and its explanation — that a belief held at great personal cost gets harder rather than easier to abandon once the cost has been paid — is the standard reference for everything on this page.

The register bears it out. Seven of the fourteen entries carried on in some form: a new date, a reinterpretation, or an institution. Those seven are, almost without exception, the ones with an organised movement attached. The seven that went quiet are mostly cases where there was nothing to carry on. A newspaper scare about a comet. A lawsuit about a collider. A calendar rollover that never belonged to anybody.

The failure, in other words, is rarely what ends it. The absence of anyone invested is.

The largest consequence on the page came from a date that passed

William Miller calculated the return of Christ from the 2,300 days of Daniel, and after a window closed in the spring of 1844 a follower's reading fixed 22 October. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand people were waiting. Many had sold property and settled their debts.

The movement called the aftermath the Great Disappointment, which is their phrase, not a critic's.

It didn't dissolve. It divided and it built. The Seventh-day Adventist Church came out of that disappointment and now counts more than twenty million members. So did the Advent Christian Church. The lineage runs on into the Watch Tower movement. An institution of that size, descended directly from a date on which nothing occurred, is the strongest available evidence against the assumption that a failed prediction settles anything.

Three ways to survive a morning

Recalculate. The arithmetic was wrong, the framework wasn't. Edgar Whisenant's booklet on 1988 was followed by a revision for 1989. Nancy Lieder's Nibiru moved from 2003 to 2012 and then to dates set by other people entirely, including David Meade's September 2017, which was recalculated to October and then to the following year. A full cycle inside eighteen months.

Spiritualise. It happened, but not anywhere anyone could look. The Watch Tower Society's expectation for 1914 became the doctrine that Christ was enthroned that year invisibly. Joanna Southcott's followers held the birth had been spiritual and the child taken up. In both cases the claim moved somewhere it couldn't be checked, which solves the immediate problem and costs everything after it.

Reinterpret the text. The Prophecy of the Popes has the longest lead time here by a distance: printed in 1595, a list ending at Peter the Roman, widely read in 2013 as naming Francis the last. Historians regard the list as a sixteenth-century forgery on grounds worth knowing, because they generalise. The descriptions are strikingly apt for popes up to about 1590 and vague for everyone after, which is the signature of a document written in 1590. When Francis reigned twelve years and Rome stood, it was the count that got reconsidered, not the list.

The one that was retracted

Harold Camping is the rarest row on this page.

Family Radio spent heavily on billboards for 21 May 2011. Followers gave up savings and jobs. When the day passed, Camping first said the judgment had been spiritual and moved the end to 21 October. That's the standard sequence and it had happened before; he'd predicted September 1994.

Then he did the unusual thing. In March 2012 he said attempting to name a date had been incorrect and sinful, that he'd been wrong to tell people God had stopped saving anyone, and the ministry stopped making predictions. Family Radio's net assets had fallen from about $135 million in 2007 to $29 million by 2011. He died the following year.

Worth naming because it's so rare, and because it carries a real cost. The retraction can't give back the savings.

The one that can't be settled

Y2K sits awkwardly on a page like this, which is why it's on it.

The defect was entirely real and well documented. Two-digit year fields, rolling to 00. Governments and corporations spent, by most estimates, hundreds of billions on remediation. The night passed with a handful of minor faults worldwide.

That outcome is consistent with two incompatible readings. The risk was overstated, or the remediation worked. The counterfactual is closed to us. Anyone confident in either direction is claiming to know something unavailable, and the honest entry on a scorecard is a blank.

It's a useful row to keep in view, because it's the case where the sceptical reflex and the credulous one are equally unearned.

What this doesn't show

It doesn't show that a dated prediction is always wrong. It shows the fourteen here were, which is a statement about fourteen things.

More usefully, it doesn't show the people who made them were foolish or dishonest. Several were neither. Miller worked from a method of biblical chronology that was ordinary in his period. The Y2K engineers were right about the defect. What recurs isn't stupidity. It's what happens to a claim once a community has paid to hold it, and that mechanism doesn't require anybody to be a fool.

The one practical thing to take from the register is a question to ask of any dated prediction while the date is still ahead. What will the people making this say if nothing happens? The answer is usually available in advance, from the way the claim is phrased. A prediction already hedged toward the invisible, the spiritual or the approximate has told you what it's going to become.