The ledger nobody keeps

Nikhil Verma opens by describing a document that does not exist. It would be dull and short. One line for each public forecast. What was said, in words clear enough that they could turn out false. Where it appeared and on what date. What actually happened. A mark: right, wrong, or too vague to judge. A running total at the foot of the page, added up by somebody with nothing to gain from the answer.

He could not find such a page for any named astrologer, any television panel, or any of the apps that sell readings by the minute.

Public forecasts are the easiest kind to check. Nobody pays for them, they are printed with a name and a date, and they attach themselves to events with clear outcomes. The 2023 World Cup final is his example, and he takes it as a composite rather than naming anybody: the forecasts went up in the days before the match, the result was known on the nineteenth, and he went looking for the article comparing the two and found none. He is careful to say he is not accusing anybody of anything. Saying in public what you think will happen is more than most of the trade ever does.

He then goes back to February 1962, when astrologers across India said the world would end at a named hour. Nothing happened. Two things were done with that afterwards, and both are still done today. It was said that the prayers had prevented the disaster. And the claim was quietly stretched, so that events years later could be counted as it coming true. He points to an astrological article from 2020 that treats February 1962 as a success because a war began that October.

Nobody keeps the record because nobody is paid to. The astrologer, the news site and the reader each have an ordinary reason to move on. Weather forecasting solved this in 1884, when one man published his tornado results and somebody else showed that writing "no tornado" every single day would have scored better.