The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project (ACLED) is a non-profit in Wisconsin. It pays some 150 researchers worldwide to track riots, government crackdowns, gang warfare, military attacks and other violence. Its CAST model, augmented with indicators such as infant mortality and peace-talk occurrences, predicts bouts of organised political violence up to six months out and is used by UN agencies and the Dutch foreign ministry. ACLED data are deemed complete enough to be used by ForecastBench, a non-profit assessing general-purpose forecasting models.
Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like "What is my purpose in life?" very quickly lacked both.