3 ms·

This might be obvious, but... the reason we have a special name for things that behave that way (Lindy effect) is because this is usually a terrible heuristic.

by edanm 6y ago

This might be obvious, but... the reason we have a special name for things that behave that way (Lindy effect) is because this is usually a terrible heuristic. Most things are "perishable", as the article puts it - past a certain age, the older a human is, the shorter their life expectancy. This is true of most things. The Lindy effect talks about the rare cases where this isn't true.

ramblerman 6y ago
> The Lindy effect applies to "non-perishable" items It's the 2nd sentence in the article. So not sure using examples of perishables shows it is a terrible heuristic. It applies to ideas/cultures/technologies.
- edanm 6y ago
  Well yes, but not only. I think there are examples where it applies to living organisms too. E.g. a few hundred years ago, a human who lived past the age of 5 would be more likely to grow to be 40, afaik. I was mostly pointing this out because a lot of people in the comments seem to be talking about this as if it's some kind of universal law, or a proposed universal law, when really this applies to only exceptional circumstances.
mellavora 6y ago
It is just a natural case of the exponential distribution, which is widely used to model expected waiting time. I wouldn't call it 'rare'. Absent other observations and/or priors, the best estimate of your expected waiting time is the amount of time you have already waited. So if you've been waiting 10 minutes for something to arrive, your best estimate of how much longer you have to wait is 10 minutes. If you've been waiting 10 years for a tech to become outdated, your best estimate for how much longer it will take is 10 years. People usually use buses as an example. So it makes sense: if the bus is supposed to come every few minutes, and it hasn't come in the last 15 minutes, then odds are something is wrong thus increasing the prob that the additional wait will also be 15 minutes.

by edanm 6y ago

ramblerman 6y ago

> The Lindy effect applies to "non-perishable" items It's the 2nd sentence in the article. So not sure using examples of perishables shows it is a terrible heuristic. It applies to ideas/cultures/technologies.

edanm 6y ago
Well yes, but not only. I think there are examples where it applies to living organisms too. E.g. a few hundred years ago, a human who lived past the age of 5 would be more likely to grow to be 40, afaik. I was mostly pointing this out because a lot of people in the comments seem to be talking about this as if it's some kind of universal law, or a proposed universal law, when really this applies to only exceptional circumstances.

mellavora 6y ago

It is just a natural case of the exponential distribution, which is widely used to model expected waiting time. I wouldn't call it 'rare'. Absent other observations and/or priors, the best estimate of your expected waiting time is the amount of time you have already waited. So if you've been waiting 10 minutes for something to arrive, your best estimate of how much longer you have to wait is 10 minutes. If you've been waiting 10 years for a tech to become outdated, your best estimate for how much longer it will take is 10 years. People usually use buses as an example. So it makes sense: if the bus is supposed to come every few minutes, and it hasn't come in the last 15 minutes, then odds are something is wrong thus increasing the prob that the additional wait will also be 15 minutes.