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A few years ago, someone wrote a tongue-in-cheek academic paper with the thesis that if people kept storing old issues of National Geographic magazine in their garages, the weight of all those issues will eventually sink North America into the ocean.
The paper was funny because it was true (even though it wasn't). If you just extend the line representing the growth of magazine storage on the graph-if we can assume the future will be just like the pastthen the graph and the conclusion are valid.
This mock study is based on what's actually a common fallacyassuming the future will be just like the past, only more so. Think of how wrong Malthus was when he predicted in 1798 that population growth would soon outstrip food production. It's the...