Perhaps the bigger problem from a statistical standpoint, however, is that precise predictions aren’t really possible to begin with when you are extrapolating on an exponential scale. A properly applied version53 of this method, which accounted for its margin of error, would have implied that there could be as few as 35,000 AIDS cases through 1995 or as many as 1.8 million. That’s much too broad a range to provide for much in the way of predictive insight.
