Predicting

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. -- Various

Expert's skills
Research shows that most experts are quite bad at predicting. Turns out that more successful predictions come from "foxes" &mdash; those thinkers who "know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible "ad hocery" that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess". 

Interwiki

 * PredictingTheFuture at Futures wiki.
 * PredictingTheFuture: "The future is strange. And it is the interacting outcome of many rules that would take a human lifetime to understand just individually. Meanwhile, our cultural picture of the future is built around Hollywood recycling its own cliches and journalists recycling Hollywood. So how do we predict the future successfully?" - an insightful essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky at SL4 wiki. Some good ideas about predicting future and why it is so hard for people to do right.
 * Future Techniques Techniques to predict the future on Wikipedia