Have you noticed that ever since November 8, the pundit class has transitioned swiftly from making (terrible) predictions about the election outcome, to making (terrible) predictions about the nature of the coming Trump presidency? Who will he nominate to be Secretary of State? What will he do in his first 100 days? Endless parlor games about predicting how some future event will unfold — these people apparently are capable of doing little else.

They engage in these pointless exercises instead of examining the actual, tangible data before them. They’re stuck in this mode of constant future-guessing, as if that’s their default posture in life. Gazing into their non-existent crystal ball and telling us, the laymen, what’s going to happen next. Why? Many of these same pundits spent literally two years, if not more, trying to forecast how the 2016 election would play out. We’ve now had hard data for a grand total of two weeks. Why not focus on that for awhile, instead of getting enmeshed in this constant daily folly of never-ending guessing games?

Trying to predict the future confers no useful informational value. It’s something that is common practice among fortune-tellers, certain religious zealots, assorted cranks, and pundits. Pundits love to do it because it requires no real work of them, and confers on them a sense of unwarranted expertise, because of course it’s they, the great and almighty, who are equipped with the analytical tools to proffer such awe-inspiring predictions for the edification of us peons.

No, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They rarely do. When they seem like they know what they’re talking about, they’re usually just pretending, because they’ve staked their professional reputations on appearing as though they know what they’re talking about. Ignore them.

I’ll admit that on occasion I’ve gotten sucked into the “prediction” game, but I’ve treated it just as that: a little side-game for laughs, not the entire premise of my working life.

If you center your existence on your ability to make the right bet, or to forecast future events, you are almost certainly doomed to fail. There is so much information available to us in the already-existing universe: why not be content with that? Why do you have to reach constantly into the non-existent future realm, when there is such bountiful data already here, before us, just waiting to be assessed. Go ahead. Try it.