Hello Canie:

I would like to raise an issue that has not been discussed so far concerning the development of an earthquake prediction form: Is it a good idea to encourage earthquake predictions on this board?

So far, nobody has shown that their predictions have any merit, so what is the point of posting fake predictions? Hits are nothing more than lucky guesses without a legitimate reason to predict.

I suspect that by increasing the importance of earthquake prediction on this board, you will increase the number of your members, but I seriously doubt that it will increase the quality of the messages in any way. Most likely your board will tend to become another board like Berkland's that pretends to be on track for learning how to predict earthquakes through pseudoscience. This trend is already evident in the increasing number of insignificant predictions followed by exhorbitant claims of success when a hit happens to occur by chance.

The value of your board resides in the scientific insights that you and a few of your members provide, not in the speculative comments about the significance of a barking dog or a stray ant that happens to wander through the kitchen.

In my opinion your board would be more meaningful by trying to encourage scientific commentary rather than adding meaningless predictions that just tend to clutter up this board.

don in berkeley