> That kind of non-committal culture (at least in the social sciences) is favored in academia because it's incredibly difficult to correctly guess or predict the future
It's not actually that it's difficult to predict the future -- it's just as difficult in industry, but they try all the time!
It's that it's difficult to prove in a peer-reviewed article that your prediction is correct. Academics don't try to say anything that can't pass peer-review.
This filter of peer-review is what limits academics from speculating. In industry, you are free of peer-review. Steve Jobs can predict that the world is moving to multi-touch phones, and it doesn't matter if his peers complain that there aren't any buttons or physical keys. He will be proven right in the marketplace.
I caught a hint of doubt on the "non-commital culture" from GP and I guess I agree with that. If they are specific models of behavior, shouldn't the model come with validating observations? If the new model is very encompassing so that good enough observations are hard to come up with or their specificity would detract from the broad view, It might be excusable. Otherwise, I would think that the paper has to clearly show it's raison d'etre to it's stakeholders, most likely interested industry -- with observations. And why not, sometimes predictions are due, specially when they contradict the status quo. The predictions don't need the pretense to be certainly true, they just need to be consistent (or follow directly) from the model.
I would expect predictions, just like a new physical theory or observation may accompany bold predictions following from it's premises.
It's not actually that it's difficult to predict the future -- it's just as difficult in industry, but they try all the time!
It's that it's difficult to prove in a peer-reviewed article that your prediction is correct. Academics don't try to say anything that can't pass peer-review.
This filter of peer-review is what limits academics from speculating. In industry, you are free of peer-review. Steve Jobs can predict that the world is moving to multi-touch phones, and it doesn't matter if his peers complain that there aren't any buttons or physical keys. He will be proven right in the marketplace.