The prophet’s dilemma

The idea of “the prophet’s dilemma” is interesting to think about. In short, it’s a type of self-defeating prophecy, where the act of predicting something causes it not to happen.

The opposite would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, which we see quite often. An example would be thinking that you have stage fright, leading to actual stage fright when you get in front of the lights.

For self-defeating prophecies, a good example comes from Oxford Reference:

A more natural and less paradoxical example is the following: a doctor may discover that a particular patient has a strong genetic predisposition to breast cancer and may predict that she will develop the disease; but the patient may respond to the prediction by having a double mastectomy, eliminating the possibility of developing breast cancer.

The prediction of breast cancer directly led to the patient not developing breast cancer. This concept came up while reading Dan Heath’s excellent book “ Upstream “, where he shares his thoughts on it:

There’s a concept called “the prophet’s dilemma”: a prediction that prevents what it predicts from happening. A self-defeating prediction. What if Chicken Little’s warnings actually stopped the sky from falling? The Y2K bug was an example of the prophet’s dilemma. The warnings that the sky would fall triggered the…