this fascinating cats cradle of thoughts and ideas

What a pleasant and positive term for something that could easily be seen as an anarchic mish-mash of tangential (?) observations, David (and mea culpa to the extent this thread is like that)

how about "prescient" as THE WORD
Hmmm. I think "prescient" relates more to the accuracy of predictions than to the way the predictions are made. You could say someone was prescient whether they did a linear projection of the present into the future or whether they took a leap into the unknown on the basis of little or no current experience - as long as the prediction turned out to be accurate.

I think I'm tending towards visionary to describe the "non-linear" predictions (and predictors).
Still haven't firmed up on a term for the "linear futurologists" - though last night a friend suggested to me that such people suffer from temporal inertia