Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. God speaks, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

So you see, in the end, it is nearly certain that the power of prediction must triumph over the arrogance of elegance.

Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.

Not only had he become adept at predicting the behavior of others, but he could predict his own behavior just as well. He no longer surprised himself. It was one of the saddest things about aging.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

Change not only was inevitable, but usually brought its own rewards.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting.

So the forecast seems to have been quite good. The question is "What was it based on?" It was not... a prophecy, it was a scientific prediction because there is a specific mechanism on which it was based. ...[T]he forecast was a scientific prediction in the sense that I wanted to stick my neck out [and] make an out-of-sample prediction to see whether the mechanisms that have been identified by our theory... actually are working in the way that we thought...

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
And?'
Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

The expected always happens

What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions.

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.