My friends and I love to make predictions about the future; whether it will be sports, work-related events, the actions of friends and family members, politics, companies or more. When this activity is done over text message, it’s not uncommon for us to screenshot and save bold predictions, in case the prediction is wrong and the ego of the predictor needs to be brought down a peg. When I get a prediction right, I brag about being NostradAmish, a portmanteau of Nostradamus (the great ancient predictor) and Amish. NostradAmish sounds like it would be a great super-hero movie-the man with the power to (supposedly) see the future!
Eventually, I became more and more accurate with my predictions, each time slightly raising the legend of NostradAmish. This is the part of the superhero movie where the hero crushes a few nameless goons, showcasing his unique style in the process. Eventually, a close friend of mine started chastising me over the name, using it in a tongue-in-cheek way (even when my guesses came out correct). Quick, somebody get Marvel Studios on the line!
All of this came to a head recently though; I was on a phone call with my mother when I came clean; I didn’t actually have the power to see the future (gasp! Dun dun dun!). My mother fell silent on the other end of the line, her jaw seemingly agape at the utter shock. I had essentially lied by omission to those closest to me. By not confessing to my lack-of-powers sooner, I had inadvertently led some to believe that I could indeed see the future. This is the part of the super-hero movie where the protagonist is at his lowest point and starts to doubt himself. Admittedly, NostradAmish is just a mortal man, albeit one who is good at observation, understanding incentives and with the keen ability of pattern recognition. There is no SpiderMan, just merely some lanky bastard named Peter Parker.
Open any economics textbook and you’ll find a definition of incentives. In fact, many books for the layman have been published discussing that humans will merely follow the incentives in front of them. Want to change a behavior? Change the incentive! The Freakonomics book series covers this foundational concept in several examples, with everything from the economics of dealing drugs vs working at McDonalds, to the rise of cheating among Chicago area teachers and mediocre sumo wrestlers, and countless more. Humans overwhelming will respond to incentives. So having a complete read of a situation and the underlying incentives is crucial to making predictions. A nice dovetail into this is the mathematical field of game theory. Game theory is used to make mathematical predictions in all sorts of fields: political campaigns, wars, sports, criminal prosecutions and countless more. Morten D. Davis has a fantastic book called Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction. Essentially, statistics and algebra can be used to calculate (an impressive amount of the time) the actions a rational player will take to maximize their odds of winning. Reading these books has helped me in developing my prediction-making prowess. This can be a solid part of the “origin story” part of the movie!
NostradAmish also has the ability to take mental notes of someone’s behaviors and preferred lines of reasoning, if they are observed a few times. Humans essentially evolved to have routines and preferences; our caveman ancestors awoke each morning at dawn and settled for the night upon darkness-routines in a way helped to keep them alive. Even in our modern lives, many of us have the same sleep cycle (which was, and still is, beneficial), same mealtimes, same worktimes, same habits, we tend to calcify our views on social/political/economic matters, use the same flawed logic and so on. Changing any of these is hard, like really hard-it requires a ton of conscious thought and intentional work when our brains just want to autopilot. We are all creatures of habit in some way, regardless of how smart, athletic, attractive or wealthy someone is. Police interrogators and NFL coaches are both adept at noticing their opponents’ routines and habits-so they can exploit them. Though, I’m not sure how paying attention and observing will make for an interesting part of the origin-story training montage part of the movie. Maybe a dramatized version of my high school football days can fit this part of the origin story? After all, that’s why football players watch film and practice against the scout team.
The last leg of the barstool of my non-superpower is pattern recognition. Humans also evolved to recognize patterns quickly. This helped the cavemen finding the best spots to hunt/fish/gather, as well as early astronomers figure out star constellations that aided navigation. Pattern recognition is one of the strongest tendencies we have; see the previous paragraph about detectives and football coaches. Personally, my pattern-recognition was sharpened by playing endless hours as an adolescent/teenager of both the Metal Gear Solid (in which the player must avoid detection) and Kingdom Hearts (live-action Final Fantasy games with a Disney skin) series. Whether it is observing the patrol patterns of enemy guards in order to see where the gaps in their coverages are before sneaking in or observing the attack/defending patterns of the Heartless, one doesn’t become good at these games without good pattern recognition skills. And I became, like, really good at both of those game franchises. Throw these scenes in the origin-story training montage as well! Is Bradley Cooper available to play me in the movie?
So, there you have it; NostradAmish isn’t a superhero at all. No flashy powers, no superhuman abilities, no billions of dollars’ worth of enhancements, nothing. Just a list of abilities that nearly any mentally competent human has, sharpened through various activities through countless practice reps during my formative years. And now that I’ve spilled my secrets, literally anyone can become a NostradAmish. Maybe revealing all of my secrets will create a better society, a society where we can all read situations a little better? Isn’t the mark of a true super-hero improving society, even after removing the cape? Sounds like a fitting end to the NostradAmish movie to me. The $200 million budget has just been green-lit and Bradley Cooper will surely win an Oscar for this one!
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