Bite me, Nostradamus

 I have been working on being psychic and I have come to terms with the fact that being psychic, as a skill, is not something I will successfully develop. So instead, I have decided to creating the air of psychic by exploiting statistics and circumstances. Now, to be psychic, I am specifically talking (for the sake of this silliness) about foretelling the future. Some people, using inferences and technology, get paid to tell the future on the daily (weathermen) but if they are anything short of 100% correct we kick and scream and we don't call their forecasts "predictions". Weathermen are not psychic. Also, there are near certainties in our world (the sun will rise tomorrow) so "predicting" those is not a mark of a psychic, and the one time the sun doesn't rise, anyone who predicted that won't really be in a position to gloat.

So here's my plan. Baseball.

As of today, the Mets have played 85 games and Mr. Pete Alonso has, in the 77 games he has been in, had 286 at bats and has hit 25 home runs. Let's assume that from the beginning of the season, I made it a practice, before every at bat, to say with confidence "Pete will hit a home run right now!" I would have been right a touch under 10% of the time. In terms of predictions, being right 10% of the time isn't horrible. But it isn't great.

Add this in, though -- I make sure, for each game, to be in a different place with different people. That means that in 77 games, 77 different groups of people would have heard me make a singular prediction about each at bat. Let's say that Alonso averages 4 at bats (I can't work with 3.714285714). Also, he has had only 1 multi-home run game.(April 5 I think) which means that he has homered in 24 separate games out of the 77 he has been in.

So back to my prediction. In 53 game situations, I will pull a goose egg and those 53 discrete groups of people will see me as a non-psychic. But 24 groups will see me as 25% of a psychic (1 home run in 4 at bats) which is better than 10%. Better than that, if I reduce my prediction to "Pete will hit a home run in this game" then 24 groups will see me as 100% a psychic while 53 groups will see me as a non-psychic. I think this means that my psychic-rating among the populace would be 31%. Of course, if I predicted in each case "Pete WON'T hit a home run in this at bat/game" my rating would climb substantially.

I might just stick to "the Mets are gonna lose" because then I'd be running over 54%.