A sealed forecast is a prediction that has been committed to public, tamper-evident record before its outcome is known — specific enough to fail, timestamped so it can't be backdated, and graded by a rubric fixed in advance. It is the smallest unit of an honest track record. Here is the whole primitive, from first principles.
A sealed forecast is a prediction committed to a public, tamper-evident record before its outcome is known — written specifically enough that it could fail, timestamped so the commitment can't be backdated, and graded against a rubric fixed at the moment of sealing. That's the whole definition, and every word in it is load-bearing. This essay builds the primitive from first principles, because almost everything sold as 'prediction' quietly drops at least one of those properties — and a forecast missing any one of them is not a sealed forecast, it's commentary wearing a future tense.
Start with the problem a seal solves. After any major event, people claim they called it, and most are not lying so much as misremembering — rounding a vague hunch up into a precise hit, editing the past in good faith. There is no way to adjudicate those claims, because there is no fixed artifact to check against. The sealed forecast exists to make the claim adjudicable: to turn 'I said it would happen' into 'here is the exact text, here is the timestamp that predates the event, recompute it yourself.'
Property one: it must be falsifiable — specific enough to be killed by reality. 'Tensions will rise in the region' cannot fail and therefore cannot succeed; the 'hit' carries no information. A real forecast names the joints at which it could break: an actor, a timing window, a target, an effect. The more independent specifics it stacks, the more ways it can fail, and the more it's worth when it survives. That's the conjunction principle, and it's [its own essay](/essays/conjunction-why-specific-forecasts-are-worth-more); the deeper point — that falsifiability is what separates intelligence from opinion — is [here](/essays/why-most-geopolitical-predictions-are-unfalsifiable).