What is Lindy Effect?
As human beings get older, as they age, their remaining life expectancy reduces. Lindy things are the opposite.
The Lindy effect is the idea that the future life expectancy of non-perishable things like books, technologies and ideas is proportional to their current age.
Lindy things age in reverse – the older they are, the longer is their remaining life. Every additional year they survive, their remaining life increases by another year.
Only the non-perishable can be Lindy.
Lindy effect is a rule of thumb (heuristic). It is generally true, but not always. It is not a law like the Law of Gravity which is always true.
Let’s dive into the origins of Lindy Effect before exploring its practical applications in day to day life.
Origins of Lindy Effect
Lindy effect is itself Lindy-proof!
Pre-Socratic thinker Periander of Corinth wrote more than twenty-five hundred years ago:
Use laws that are old but food that is fresh.
More recently, Albert Goldman, an American author and academic, coined this term in his 1964 article in The New Republic titled “Lindy’s Law”. The term Lindy refers to Lindy’s delicatessen in New York, where comedians gathered every night to conduct post-mortems on recent show business action. The article described a belief among the city’s media observers
The amount of material comedians have is constant, and therefore, the frequency of output predicts how long their series will last.
Benoit Mandelbrot defined a different concept called the Lindy Effect in his 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In Mandelbrot’s version, the more appearances comedians make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make.
However long a person’s past collected works, it will on the average continue for an equal additional amount.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan extended Mandelbrot’s idea to a certain class of non-perishables where life expectancy can be expressed as power laws.
In Taleb’s 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, he explicitly referred to the Lindy Effect and incorporated it into his broader theory of the Antifragile.
If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years.
But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years.
This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!
You can read my summary of the book Antifragile and also Nassim’s article “An Expert called Lindy“.
Relevance of Lindy Effect in Life
Many things in modern life have small, immediately visible benefits. But the cost or adverse effects are hidden, non-obvious and occur after a long time.
A couple of examples:
1. The benefits of modern life and technology are immediately visible, but their cost, like impact on climate change and health, will be known only after decades or centuries.
2. Enjoying your life in your 20s and 30s by spending your money or not caring for your health, and the benefits are visible in terms of having a good time. But the impacts of saving less and bad health will be known only after decades.
How can you decide if something is good for you?
More specifically: How can you determine something will not have adverse effects after a long time?
Lindy Effect provides a useful rule of thumb to assist in these questions.
For things to survive, they necessarily need to fare well in the risk dimension, that is, be good at not dying.
By the Lindy effect, if an idea has skin in the game, it is not in the truth game, but in the harm game.
An idea survives if it is a good risk manager.
[It] not only doesn’t harm its holders, but favors their survival.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
When you cannot decide, let Time decide.
Lindy makes Time the final judge of value and quality.
Practical Uses of Lindy Effect
A non-exhaustive list where knowledge of Lindy is useful to decide what is good or potentially bad for you.
Food
Expert research has performed flip-flops on whether fats, cholesterol, carbs in the diet are good or bad for you. One day a newspaper article highlights research that coffee or vitamin pills are good for you. Next day you see another saying that either will kill you very soon.
Food processing is a big business and a lot of the research is directly or indirectly funded by food processors or their detractors. Some of this has also influenced dietary guidelines issued by governments.
Books and experts flog different kinds of diets – Atkins, Paleo, Keto, and so on.
No wonder it is confusing to decide what is good for you and whom to trust.
Lindy comes to the rescue here.
Eat what your grandparents or great grandparents ate.
- Two-three generations ago, people ate whole foods. These are foods where you could identify what went into the stuff you are eating.
- They ate home cooked food where the quality of ingredients was known.
- They relied on local produce suitable to the local climate and to the local population and its cultural habits, instead of the ones transported from far away places.
Eat biryani in Hyderabad, curd rice in Chennai and Misal Pav in Mumbai 🙂
When in Rome, live as the Romans do (and eat pasta and risotto!).
Health
My regular readers are aware that sometimes less is more (via negativa).
If you are in good health and suffering from minor seasonal illnesses (common cold, flu) then let nature be the cure. Popping pills just to get over minor discomfort is not advisable.
If you have a serious health condition threatening survival, then experiment with any treatment that increases the probability of survival. Lindy (time) hasn’t had a chance to judge the experimental treatments and you are on our own.
Are dietary (vitamin) supplements good for healthy people?
The question is did healthy people take regular supplements two or three generations back. That’s a no. You may say life expectancy was lower too. Did the life expectancy increase because of people taking vitamin pills. That’s a no too.
Here’s Naval views on it.
“Supplements aren’t Lindy and we overestimate our knowledge about complex systems like the human body.”
Naval Ravikant, Founder of AngelList
Knowledge
A few decades back the person reading multiple newspapers was respected and often asked for advice. This knowledge wasn’t always flawless, but it was of decent quality as the newspaper articles was curated by a set of editors and went through a review process.
With internet and social media, we are drowning in data, information and such a variety opinions that it is impossible to know whom to trust and what is truly timeless knowledge.
Lindy provides some guidance.
Proverbs / Aphorisms
“A stitch in time saves nine” or “In Rome, do as the Romans do” are proverbs.
Proverbs embody timeless wisdom passed informally word-of-mouth down generations. They have survived even when other knowledge has been lost. They have adapted to changing times and been re-discovered and re-packaged to suit the times.
Lindy effect is the re-discovery of ancient saying “Old is gold“.
Reading
What to read is a common question.
Answer: Read foundational books.
- In Biology read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- In Economics read The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- In Philosophy read the wisdom of Buddha, and ancient Greeks or Chinese.
- In Religious texts, read Gita, Quran, Bible, Dhammapada
- Read Philosophy instead of Self-Help books. Self-help books are an accessible introduction to philosophies re-discovered and re-packaged to suit the tastes of the current generation. But if you are not reading anything, then start anywhere.
Traditions
Ancient cultures (Indian, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Persian) have a lot of knowledge and wisdom built into cultural rituals, ceremonies and festivals.
A good example is of fasting intermittently. Fasting is being re-discovered across the world today as a proven solution to the ills in our society – obesity, lifestyle diseases. Ancients likely built fasting into the religious rituals and festivals to address such ills of abundance. With the passage of centuries the rituals remained and the reasons for the rituals were lost.
Not all traditions are great, some are absolutely out-dated.
But next time you decide to challenge or break a tradition, hit pause and try to re-discover the ‘why’ behind the tradition before breaking it.
Other Examples of Lindy
Business strategy – Everyone is chasing the next new thing or strategy to win in the market place. Very few are focused on things that don’t change with time, things that are Lindy. Search for a video of Jeff Bezos and his single-minded focus on customer experience. This is Lindy in action.
Technology – Wheel and fire were breakthrough technologies that transformed human civilization but are so common place that they are invisible. Technology refers to anything that is yet to be perfected. Once perfected, it becomes invisible. Anyone wants to bet on whether Instagram will be around after a century or the ancient rock paintings, wheel and fire? Lindy should give a lot of hope to Mainframe developers!
Financial planning – Lots of fads and products being touted by those earning commission on sales. But simple rules are the best for personal finance.
Travel – When you visit a new place, visit the oldest monument before the newest tower. Chances are the monument will be around for the next generation.
Agriculture – Organic food vs. chemically doused food. Traditional seeds vs. genetically modified ones. I guess you get the gist.
In summary:
Effectively Lindy answers the age-old meta-questions:
Who will judge the expert?
Who will guard the guard? (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
Who will judge the judges?
Well, survival will.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
Let time decide, when you cannot.
Caution with Lindy: Survivorship Bias
The Lindy Effect suggest that ideas that have survived are useful, relevant and help their adopters survive and thrive over time.
But, Lindy effect is a rule of thumb (heuristic). It is generally true, but not always. It is not a law like the Law of Gravity, which is always true.
Survivorship Bias suggests that, minus outliers, things themselves statistically do not survive like we think they do.
For example: Warren Buffett has become a billionaire by being successful at investing. Survivorship bias is to blindly pick one successful example, ignoring the millions of other investors who achieved poor results or even went bankrupt.
My advice with Lindy is:
Lindy Effect provides a framework to assess choices in a complex world with incomplete, unreliable, contradictory information and where ‘so called’ professional experts cannot be trusted to act in your interest.
Lindy provides a guidance, to help assess your choices. But it not a solution to ALL problems.
Lindy it is a not a substitute for thinking and applying good judgement.
Thoughts on Lindy
Rolf Dobelli, in his book The Art of Thinking Clearly, writes –
You’re sitting in a chair, an invention from ancient Egypt. You wear pants developed about 5000 years ago and adapted by Germanic tribes around 750 B.C. The idea behind your leather shoes comes from the last ice age. Your bookshelves are made of wood, one of the oldest building materials in the world.
The science fiction author William Gibson said:
The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed..
I would extend this to say – “The future is already here – but the most robust portions of it happened a long time ago.”
As the science fiction author Ursula Le Guin once put it, if you wish to understand that which is enduring, you’re better off exploring the capaciousness of myths than fine-tuning present lines of reasoning.
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal.
The real mystery is not destroyed by reason.
The fake one is.
Finally, a closing thought on Lindy from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When the beard (or hair) is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion.
When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion.
When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion.
Hope you found this article useful.
If you know of more Lindy things, please use the Comments at the bottom to add them, so that all the readers benefit.
Read More Like This
- Book Summary: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Via Negativa: When Less is More
- Weakness and Ignorance Are Not Barriers to Survival, But Arrogance Is
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Such an informative post! I have never heard about Lindy before and really enjoyed reading your article! I share and agree on a lot of your points… I am a “less is more” person! 😉 a lot of input here I save it! Thanks!