Static analysis
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- This is the article defining the statistical technique of static analysis, if you seek the programming technique, see static code analysis
Static analysis, static projection, and static scoring are terms for the sometimes-dubious technique of taking existing trends and projecting them in some way, producing often wildly unrealistic results which do not compensate for practical consideration or other natural or unpredicted factors.
Its opposite, dynamic analysis, is projection based upon how variables may change or interact, and is more likely to include factors like saturation.
A famous example of static analysis is overpopulation theory; starting with Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century, various "experts" have taken some short-term population growth trend and projected it for years into the future, resulting in the prediction that there would be disastrous overpopulation within a generation or two. Malthus himself essentially claimed that British society would collapse under the weight of overpopulation by 1850, while in the sixties the book The Population Bomb made similar doomsday predictions for the US by the 1980s.
Similarly, the environmental movement took a short-term trend of temperature declines in the 1970s and proclaimed that the world would be in an ice age by 1990. As with the overpopulation theories, the projection ended up less accurate than a roll of the dice because it didn't take into account how things interact, nor how a short-term spike was being treated like a long-term trend.
Other examples of this include government budget projections, and attempts to predict private economic growth.
Typically, static analysis works for very simple systems; how fast is snow accumulating in what is thought to be the mid-point of a blizzard. But even then it must be tempered with rationality -- guess how much longer the storm might actually last, rather than assuming that snow will fall continually for the next sixty years, and project the average of the storm so far, rather than plotting the curve of its growth as if that will continue to increase for the second half.
Infinite ideology
When applied to any more complex system, though, the effect tends to be worse at making predictions than random chance.One of the most cutting-edge variations on this theme is technological singularity, where people take some factor of knowledge growth, like computer intelligence, and project it into the future, resulting in apparently impossible curves which say that all will be known by a relatively near date.
A satire of this premise has been presented using safety razors; After their invention, all were single razors for seventy years, then the first double bladed razor was introduced. But it only required 15 years for a third blade to be added, and then one year for the fourth and fifth. By projecting this increasing curve, a prediction was presented that safety razors would have an infinite number of blades by the year 2015, only nine years from the time of calculation.
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