predicting the past

would one take a person who can predict the past seriously?
It sounds silly, but why would anyone be inclined to take someone who can
predict the past seriously.
One would be surprised to find out this is generally what we do.

A seer, usually engages the interest of a potential patron by
providing information about ones past with no details from the patron.

A seer when he has established sufficient credibility to be believed upon,
would profess to predict your future.

Herein lies the blind spot.
We do not live our future based on yesterday or that of the day before.
A converse would be we have not lived the yesterday based on our tomorrow.

If the seer indeed was so proficient in predicting ones future, he
should have done better of his own future.
I mean why would he care to remain a seer rendering his quant services
when he could be a nuclear physicist or stock broker or a punter or a bookie placing all the right bets.

To predict the future of at least inanimate objects, one needs to know of precisely the position of every element in the universe and how it does play a role in affecting our position in the present and in the future.

This can be explained by the Berry experiment who illustrated the assumptions required to predict the positions of the billiard balls on a table.
By the ninth impact of the ball, you would have to
include the gravitational pull of a person standing near the table. By the 56th impact to calculate the position of the ball, one would have include every particle in the universe.

A parallel to the Berry experiment was Lorenzo discovery of the Butterfly effect.
He was working on a computer simulation of a weather system that predicted the weather a few days head. On re-running the experiment he found that he got completely different results.
He found that on rounding off just a single input parameter changed the results from his first simulation run.

Despite the limitation in predicting the future of the weather or the 56th impact of a billiard ball, common folk would read horoscopes and meander with astrology...