While Matthew says “Overall I find the law to be pretty much empirically validated, at least by the standards I’d expect from a half in jest Law of Prediction,” I don’t agree: I don’t think an actual trendline on the chart would be particularly close to the Platt’s Law line. I think it would, instead, predict that Bio Anchors should point to longer timelines than 30 years out.
I ran OLS regression on the data, and this was the result. Platt’s law is in blue.
I agree this trendline doesn’t look great for Platt’s law, and backs up your observation by predicting that Bio Anchors should be more than 30 years out.
However, OLS is notoriously sensitive to outliers. If instead of using some more robust regression algorithm, we instead super arbitrarily eliminated all predictions after 2100, then we get this, which doesn’t look absolutely horrible for the law. Note that the median forecast is 25 years out.
I ran OLS regression on the data, and this was the result. Platt’s law is in blue.
I agree this trendline doesn’t look great for Platt’s law, and backs up your observation by predicting that Bio Anchors should be more than 30 years out.
However, OLS is notoriously sensitive to outliers. If instead of using some more robust regression algorithm, we instead super arbitrarily eliminated all predictions after 2100, then we get this, which doesn’t look absolutely horrible for the law. Note that the median forecast is 25 years out.