How Broadway actors learned to predict the future

The greatest minds in the world have tried and failed at predicting the future. My weather app, which quite literally has one job, gives me trust issues on a weekly basis when it snows even when the chances of snow were zero (thanks, Toronto). Where scientists, physicists, and mathematicians all failed; prevailed broadway actors. Actors would often convene at a small cheesecake restaurant in New York called Lindy's Cheesecakes and discuss which broadway show would survive and which would be forever forgotten.

They noticed that the longer a show has been running, the longer it kept running. Say, a show has been around for a year, it had a high chance of surviving another year. If it made it to the two-year mark, then another two years could be added to its lifespan. This phenomenon came to be known as the Lindy Effect. Mathematicians such as Bernoit Mandelbrot and Nassim Taleb have attempted to formalize this phenomenon and give it some probabilistic backing. There's even a wiki page for this!

I've personally noticed this phenomenon being quite accurate with books. Can you name more than 3 books from the New York Times Bestsellers list 10 years ago? what about 20?. There are books that could have been a tweet that become all the rage because they had a curse in their title: books that will soon be forgotten if they haven't already been. Then there's the class of books that are timeless; have been around for hundreds of years; weathered wars, dictatorship, fires, and still positively impact society such as Meditations by Marcus Aurellius, The Odyssey by Homer, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Between a book with an obnoxiously moronic title and the diary of a Roman Emperor who lived two millennia ago, I'd bet the diary lives on for another two millennia as long as our planet does.