aftcast means A kind of analysis which takes an event which has already happened, or is assumed to happen, and studies the causes which could have led up to that event. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 95 out of 100.
Why “aftcast” is a great word
AFTCAST — [Noun] A speculative analysis that takes a given event—whether historical or hypothetical—and calculates the causal pathways that could have led to that outcome. From 'aft' (meaning 'behind' or 'after') + 'cast' (meaning 'to project or calculate'), modelled on the word 'forecast'. Unlike a forecast, which projects forward into possibility, or a postmortem, which dissects backward from a known failure, an aftcast is a conditional archaeology of cause. It is the historian’s twilight exercise of reasoning from a fallen kingdom back to the single unlucky horseshoe nail, the strategist’s game of asking what diplomatic whispers might have prevented an inevitable war, or the novelist sketching the childhood that might have produced the villain—a sobering exercise in the physics of possibility, proving that every actual past was once merely the most probable future.
noun
- A kind of analysis which takes an event which has already happened, or is assumed to happen, and studies the causes which could have led up to that event.“We should not be too harsh about forecasters, however; we have the benefit of hindsight now, yet it is not much easier to answer the questions about the past than about the present or future. Postdiction is almost as hard as prediction; aftcasts almost as hard as forecasts.”
verb
- To make an aftcast.“Backwards planning relieves you of some of the superhuman assumptions that are involved in traditional forecasting. It substitutes aftcasting for forward planning by causing you to look backwards from your objectives to ask the question: What must have had to have happened in order for each of our successive planned milestones to have been reached?”