Wishcasting Meaning and Origin

What Does Wishcasting Mean?

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Origin of Wishcasting

The term ‘wishcasting’ is a portmanteau of “wish” and “forecasting,” with very specific, data-driven roots, mostly in meteorology and political data science. Since this term is quite new and rarely seen outside certain fields, it is currently in the “Wild West” phase of definition. Since the word seems similar to “spellcasting” or “broadcasting,” people attempt to pull it into the world of manifesting (such as manifesting one’s dreams) or metaphysics. All such uses are incorrect.

Wishful Thinking vs. Wishcasting: What’s the Difference?

While they share the same DNA, these two terms function differently in modern English:

• Wishful Thinking (The Foundation): This is a general state of mind. It is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence or rationality. If you say, “I hope I win the lottery so I can retire tomorrow,” you are engaging in wishful thinking. It is passive and purely emotional.
• Wishcasting (The Action): This is the application of wishful thinking to a specific forecast or data set. Wishcasting happens when someone takes “wishful thinking” and tries to dress it up as a legitimate prediction. “I’ve analyzed the last six months of winning numbers, and since a ‘7’ hasn’t appeared in three weeks, it’s statistically ‘due’ to hit tonight. I’ve already started looking at real estate listings because the data practically guarantees a win.”

A person engaging in wishful thinking just hopes for a result. A person “wishcasting” looks at 50 data points, finds the one outlier that supports their hope, and broadcasts it as the most likely outcome.

Wishcasting as “Spiritual Manifesting”

Spiritual and “New Age” bloggers often use wishcasting as a synonym for manifestation or creative visualization, both of which center on the idea that thinking about what you want can cause it to happen. This is a misunderstanding of the term. Wishcasting is not about creating the result you want. Rather, it is about ignoring evidence that a positive result is unlikely and allowing your biases to cloud your thinking. The mistake is in thinking that wishcasting means much the same as positive thinking, when, in fact, it is a failure to think objectively about what is actually happening its likely outcome.

While a ‘cast’ can refer to a magic spell, in this context, it is strictly derived from ‘forecast’, the act of calculating future events based on current data, not the act of wishing them into existence.

Wishcasting as “Broadcasting Your Desires”

Due to sharing the same -casting suffix, some people think that wishcasting means broadcasting your desires or, in other words, putting your wishes out there by telling people what you want. This is much like the “manifestation” confusion, based on the idea that “broadcasting one’s hopes out into the world” will bring about their fulfillment. The term refers to forecasting, however, not broadcasting. The -casting suffix refers to the act of prediction. Telling your friends you want a promotion is just sharing a goal. Telling your friends you will definitely get a promotion because you read your star sign is trending in management is wishcasting.

The Weather Weenie Connection

Professional meteorologists often use the term wishcasting the bias of a forecaster who seems to want a certain weather pattern to appear. Instead of deriving their prediction from an aggregation of all available models, these forecasters pick the model that most appeals to them; the one that fits their wish. Amateur weather enthusiasts, often called “weather weenies” often fall prey to this sort of confirmation bias. E.g. “I see a computer model showing 10 inches of snow, so it’s definitely going to snow!” the Mount Washington Observatory defines this as “hoping for a big storm because you want to see it.”

The Political “Polling” Delusion

Wishcasting often becomes a major buzzword during election cycles. Political analysts often use the term for those who cherry-pick polling data, especially those results which represent statistical outliers, such as a certain district polling in an unusual way.

Business “Visionary Forecasts” vs. Wishes

The term wishcasting is beginning to appear in the corporate world of IT and finance department, where it is used to describe bad budgeting practices. This usually involves the “wishful thinking” of reducing spending through actions that are not based on any concrete plan. E.g. “We will magically reduce our cloud spending by 50% next year through ‘efficiency’.”

Since there is no actual plan or even any actual data to support the spending reduction, professionals call this “wishcasting.” Often, these numbers are simply placed on spreadsheets to keep the board of directors happy. Managers sometimes try to rebrand wishcasting as “ambitious goal setting” or “visionary leadership.” This piece on Medium provides actionable tips on breaking free from “wishcasting” in IT spending.

Further Reading: Weather-Related Idioms

• On Cloud Nine: Explore how the 1895 International Cloud Atlas gave us this term for extreme happiness.
• Perfect Storm: Another meteorological term used to describe a rare combination of events.
• If Wishes Were Horses: The 17th-century ancestor to wishcasting—a reminder that desires aren’t reality.
• Steal Someone’s Thunder: From the theater to the forecast—how a stage effect became a common idiom.
• Save for a Rainy Day: The practical side of forecasting—preparing for a less-than-ideal future.
• It Never Rains But It Pours: When your “wishcast” fails and everything goes wrong at once.
• Rain on Someone’s Parade: What happens when the objective data finally ruins a perfectly good wishcast.