The Bodleian Library’s exhibition Oracles, Omens and Answers offers a rather different perspective on prognostication than the FT’s usual position. Instead of economists and political pollsters, the exhibition discusses predictions made using the stars, or children’s games, or, most strikingly, large Cameroonian spiders.
That last one works like this. The spider is presented with a stone, a stick and some cards made of leaves, and a spider diviner then interprets the way the spider moves the cards around. Anthropologist and curator David Zeitlyn says that in parts of Cameroon, the results of spider divinations are admissible in court.
For all my scepticism about economic forecasts, I would still be inclined to pay more attention to an economist than a spider. That said, the spider has one clear advantage over many human forecasters: unlike the humans, it is genuinely disinterested.