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The author makes a common statistical error in interpreting the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect proposes, simplified, that the longer something has been around,

The author makes a common statistical error in interpreting the Lindy effect. The Lindy effect proposes, simplified, that the longer something has been around, the longer it will probably stay around still. The author then makes a quick jump and posits that the opposite is also true, which it is not. Just because something has been around for a short time does not mean that its expected lifespan is somehow short. In other words, A implies B does not mean B implies A as well. All things that have been around for a long time had at one point only been around for a short time.

blowski 4y ago
I’d never heard of the Lindy effect! By the author’s logic, COBOL programs still in use today will long outlive Linux. That could even be true.
andrewchambers 4y ago
It just says visual studio is statistically more likely to die out - as most software does.
jinwoo68 4y ago
A "logical" error rather than a statistical one :)
zwieback 4y ago
Very true but I think what's also implied in the article is that new tools (VS Code) that look very different from old tools (vi/emacs) will probably not last. So, if A is very old and B is very different from A then B is less likely to succeed. I don't believe that, btw, just guessing at the mindset of the author.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  Even that's a fairly bad take. Visual Studio Code is based on a much older line (visual studio) which dates back to 1997. It's not nearly so new as it may seem, although I certainly appreciate the refresh from the older, more feature-filled (and feature slowed) visual studio proper. Not to mention - most of the "new stuff" in visual studio code is really just a nice UI layer that's built using mature and incredibly battle tested tooling - HTML/CSS/JS.
  - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
    Is VS Code actually based on Visual Studio? I thought it was purely a marketing-based connection like Java/Javascript.
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      Depends on how you define "based on", I suppose. It comes from the same parent company, with a lot of interest in solving many of the same challenges. The UI paradigms are obviously related, and if you've ever done any real VS project debugging, you'll find the structure of those configuration files very (very) similar to how tasks work in VSCode. I don't believe the VSCode codebase ever actually pulled anything from the original visual studio, but the roots of the application clearly come from the same place.
      - pvg 4y ago
        It's not meaningfully based on VS proper beside the name. The main difference is it lives in a very different ecological niche. Microsoft wouldn't have taken up its development if it didn't.
        323 4y ago
        If disruption does happen, it's better to be the one disrupting your own product than let others do it. Some people, a few for now, are migrating from VS proper to VS Code, including for languages like C++/C#. I am one of them.
        withinboredom 4y ago
        I can’t really use VS code for work (PHP support is nonexistent compared to PHPStorm), but I needed to make some changes to a C++ codebase in WSL. VS couldn’t get anything to work, I couldn’t even get it to compile. VS code got compiling and step debugging via gdb working after just a few tweaks to the make file and tasks. Worked like a charm.
  - 4y ago
jackpirate 4y ago
I believe you are incorrect. According to wikipedia: > The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. This implies that things that have been around for a short period of time do in fact have a short expected lifespan. You're correct that "A implies B does not mean B implies A as well", but that assumption is not needed.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
I think the Lindy effect can work in reverse. Like if you had a collection 1000 things that are all just invented, then the likelihood would be only a small percentage of them will be around and in use in 50 years. Compared with a collection of 1000 things that have all be in use for 100 years, the percentage of them that will be around in 50 years will be much greater.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup, it seems that this 'effect' is simply extrapolating from randomness and averages. Take any random thing and random time (with zero knowledge of actual lifespan), and on average, you are in the middle of it's lifespan. Therefore, if Thing-A has existed for 28 years, it is likely to last for another 28, if Thing-B has existed for 6 years, it's likely to exist for another 6, and so on. It may be somewhat informative for comparisons but not in real life. You are hiking away from a disaster with all your possessions and life's savings in your backpack, and are now at a muddy riverbank needing to cross. You ask me how deep the river is and I tell you the average depth is 6 inches. That sounds great, but I have most definitely NOT told you that you'll be able to get across without finding a deep spot and having to drop your backpack to survive. Using this effect to make judgements about product lifetime is similarly uninformative. It is a hint leading to only a possible inference, not data leading to a valid prediction.
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    With respect to software objects, the most likely reasons for their life to end are: 1. Not sufficiently useful relative to involved costs for most applications(data formats, configuration maintenance, etc.) 2. Disrupted by something that is "10x better" for the purpose(e.g. using a spreadsheet instead of a text editor for 2D, cell-oriented data) 3. Outside forces invading the ecosystem and obsoleting dependencies(new OS, hardware, etc.) So what the Lindy effect describes in long-lived software is just the software that is relatively cheap to keep around, is hard to greatly surpass and resists invasion - which describes a lot of "worse-is-better" software, where the UX kinda sucks, and it's actually a bit too unstructured for any particular application, but not enough of these things that anyone cares to address it in the relevant professional scenarios where it comes up: instead the user just girds themselves to fight it into submission because they can spend six hours fighting it and one week debugging it or two weeks making a Right Thing that is much less compatible.
feral 4y ago
Disagree: even in your formulation, no 'quick jump' is needed. Your statement A:"The longer something has been around, the longer it will be around" is not the opposite of B:"the shorter something has been around, the shorter it will be around". Rather they mean the same thing. 'longer' and 'shorter' here are just English language ways of referring to the same time t that an object has been around. If someone tells you "the longer a distance is, the more time it takes to walk it", that is exactly the same as "the shorter a distance is, the less time it takes to walk it"; there's no logical leap there. I could conceive a rule that says "archeological artefacts are likely to be around for a long time" and it'd be a mistake to conclude that this means that non-archelogical artefacts will only be around for a short time. But that doesn't seem to be how the Lindy effect is formulated, either on Wikipedia or on your post, so there doesn't seem to be an error in applying it to new things.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  The real meaning of the Lindy effect is: the more something has been continued to be around due to be continuously and repeatedly selected from a pool of similar other somethings, the longer it will likely continue to be so. Because this is a statistical effect (longer lived things are drawn from a pool of things, some of which are not long lived), you cannot invert it trivially. If there is no selection process, then the Lindy effect is either meaningless, or decomposes to an assertion that the current thing is the only way to do something.
  - feral 4y ago
    Ok, so let's say discuss your formulation instead: Why can't we 'invert' it, just because it's statistical effect? Yes, in your formulation, some of the new things in the pool will go on to live a long time, while others will be selected out. But so what? We are talking about the expected lifetime of an item in the pool, conditioned only on it's age. There's no fundamental problem making a statement that this expected lifetime is short for new things, even if some fraction of those new things will last a long time, right? After all, we don't know any one individual item that's been around a long time will last a lot longer. We only know we expect it to. Because even long lived items have finite lifetime, hence they'll eventually die (and when they do it'll be really surprising, because they've been around so long; but it will happen eventually.) And so the statement is always talking about expected lifetime, whether for items that have already lasted a long or short time. (Hence I still don't think there's really any logical 'inversion' here.)
szundi 4y ago
These statements of "longer" and "shorter" actually refers to probabilities. So it makes sense to state when something is not "longer", then it is "shorter". So I disagree, OP's statements about the Lindy effect makes sense. Also someone commented about COBOL. Of course no one thinks COBOL "is around", what also means statistics about usage. COBOL is declining and almost no one uses it anymore, so it is safe to say "it is almost not around".
- tarboreus 4y ago
  There are 220 billion lines of COBAL in production. Much of the most essential banking infrastructure in the world runs on COBAL, and is likely to indefinitely. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cobol-trends/#:~:text=According%20to%20Reuters%2C%20you%20can,state%20of%20COBOL%20in%202020 https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cobol-trends/#:~:text=According%20.... The only way we stop using COBAL in production this century is to have some kind of apocalypse, or maybe an apotheosis.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    Given that the typo was made 3 times (suggesting that it's a misunderstanding, rather than a mistake), hopefully you will take this comment in the educational manner in which it's intended rather than being a snide "gotcha" - it's COBOL, not COBAL.
yarg 4y ago
The Lindy effect states that the expected lifetime of a thing is proportional to its current age. That includes the expectation that something young will be (on average) half way through its lifespan.
- monkeybutton 4y ago
  Can it also apply to the time until an event which hasn't yet happened? Ie. a system you have never observed crashing before, has been running for T hours. So being on average half way through its lifespan, will probably run another T hours without incident.
  - yarg 4y ago
    Not quite. It works based upon the 100% certainty that whatever you are, at some point you will cease to be. On average, regardless of what you are, you are in the middle of your life or existence (some very high variance here). In order to generalise it to non-certain events, such as a program crash, you'd need to remove the certainty assumption and rejig the consequent statistics - it might be doable, but you wouldn't end up with something quite so clean and simple.
    - subjectsigma 4y ago
      I am interested in this topic but never quite understood it. Is there a techincal reason why these organizations don't transpile COBOL to C? I imagine building such a compiler wouldn't be that hard, and even if it is, we've had decades to work on it. Is it more of a process thing (having to change unit tests, code review, hire new people, etc) that prevents this? Or is it just too risky given the important roles of the mainframes?
      - yarg 4y ago
        Wrong comment?
        4y ago
Barrin92 4y ago
That's not right. The Lindy argument holds in that case as well, it's just a different version of the doomsday argument. The basis for this kind of reasoning is essentially that, if you can assume that you are an 'average user' (and you don't have reason to believe you're especially late or early), the chance that your prediction about the longevity of the project is correct is most likely to be true if you 1/3 - 3x[1] the lifespan of the project currently. That is because if say, you predicted VsCode existed a hundred times longer than it currently did, that prediction is only true if you are indeed among the first 1%. 99% of VsCode users making that prediction will be wrong. [1]https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VfpAbtj-yOq5gHhYIdgrAIdBuw=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16680423/Doomsday1.png https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VfpAbtj-yOq5gHhYIdgrAIdBuw=...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
avindroth 4y ago
> The Lindy effect proposes, simplified, that the longer something has been around, the longer it will probably stay around still. I think there is a linguistic ambiguity here. What is meant by "the longer something has been around"? Longer with respect to what? If you mean to say if A has been around longer than B, then A will stay around longer than B (in expectation), then this law is commutative with respect to A and B and what you specify as "opposite" holds. If you mean to say if something has been around for t then it will stay around for some f(t) where f is an increasing function, then again what you specify as "opposite" holds.
madrox 4y ago
I don't think there's anything in the wording of the Lindy effect that means it's only a one way inference. It says the life expectancy of a thing is proportional to its age. That makes sense to me. If a product is going to die, it's likely to die fast. If a product sticks around five years, it's more likely it'll be around for ten more. It's why startups go under all the time, but you don't hear of a lot of 50 year old companies going out of business. I think the error is interpreting these things literally. If we did, then if it were 1990 we'd say Windows wouldn't be see the next century. Probabilities are attached.
randal_handle 4y ago
The converse of "the longer something has been around, the longer it will probably stay around still" is "the longer something will probably stay around (in the future), the longer it will have already been around (from the past)." The change from longer to shorter is not a logical converse.
dwighttk 4y ago
But a lot more things have only ever been around for a short time. Only a few made it through that “having been around a short time”, stay around longer than expected, and become exceptions to the rule.
samatman 4y ago
This is correct, let me take a crack at explaining why. The Lindy effect is named after a restaurant, Lindy's, which ironically closed recently. If we were to take it as invertible, we would have to conclude that a brand-new restaurant, which opened an hour ago, is most likely to shut down one hour from now. This is an obvious absurdity: if we wish to speculate on the longevity of new things, we can't use the Lindy effect to do so. It's a good heuristic for betting that something will continue, it's a bad heuristic for betting something won't.
- bdowling 4y ago
  > ... a brand-new restaurant, which opened an hour ago, is most likely to shut down one hour from now. A new restaurant that opened one hour ago existed for months during its planning stages. That restaurant will probably not survive its first few months of business.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > most likely to shut down one hour from now. Yeah but in an hour it most likely shut down in two hours /s I really don't get the whole argument over this definition, to me it sounds like a funny observation more than a law of the Universe.
  - samatman 4y ago
    It's useful if you're trying to decide which is going to last longer, Harvard, or Bob's Quality Education Mill est. 2022. It's not useful if you're trying to decide whether Bob's Education Mill will last longer than the state-funded community college opened in the same year, there are plenty of other heuristics which we might use there, but not this one.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Reading through the wiki page, the Lindy effect is not so much about the the restaurant itself. It was initially about a comic's ability to stay relevant by not having too many appearances then later seemingly co-opted by Mandelbrot and Taleb to mean what it does now. Lindy's law is a strange one for sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#cite_note-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#cite_note-6 https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1964-goldman.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1964-goldman.pdf
catherd 4y ago
Well, that was certainly a successful nerd-snipe.
Aeolun 4y ago
There are 1000 things that have been around for 1 year. There are 10 things that have been around for 10 years. I think it’s safe to say that there is less chance of any individual thing that’s 1 year old being around in 1 year than the things that have already survived for 10.
- skybrian 4y ago
  Well, yes, but that's the outside view, based on knowing very little. If you know more than just the age, often you can get better estimates.
ascar 4y ago
> In other words, A implies B does not mean B implies A as well. I think you wanted to write A implies B does not mean "not A" implies "not B" as well. B implies A would be: the longer something will probably stay around, the longer it already has been around.

blowski 4y ago

I’d never heard of the Lindy effect! By the author’s logic, COBOL programs still in use today will long outlive Linux. That could even be true.

andrewchambers 4y ago

It just says visual studio is statistically more likely to die out - as most software does.

jinwoo68 4y ago

A "logical" error rather than a statistical one :)

zwieback 4y ago

Very true but I think what's also implied in the article is that new tools (VS Code) that look very different from old tools (vi/emacs) will probably not last. So, if A is very old and B is very different from A then B is less likely to succeed. I don't believe that, btw, just guessing at the mindset of the author.

horsawlarway 4y ago
Even that's a fairly bad take. Visual Studio Code is based on a much older line (visual studio) which dates back to 1997. It's not nearly so new as it may seem, although I certainly appreciate the refresh from the older, more feature-filled (and feature slowed) visual studio proper. Not to mention - most of the "new stuff" in visual studio code is really just a nice UI layer that's built using mature and incredibly battle tested tooling - HTML/CSS/JS.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  Is VS Code actually based on Visual Studio? I thought it was purely a marketing-based connection like Java/Javascript.
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    Depends on how you define "based on", I suppose. It comes from the same parent company, with a lot of interest in solving many of the same challenges. The UI paradigms are obviously related, and if you've ever done any real VS project debugging, you'll find the structure of those configuration files very (very) similar to how tasks work in VSCode. I don't believe the VSCode codebase ever actually pulled anything from the original visual studio, but the roots of the application clearly come from the same place.
    - pvg 4y ago
      It's not meaningfully based on VS proper beside the name. The main difference is it lives in a very different ecological niche. Microsoft wouldn't have taken up its development if it didn't.
      - 323 4y ago
        If disruption does happen, it's better to be the one disrupting your own product than let others do it. Some people, a few for now, are migrating from VS proper to VS Code, including for languages like C++/C#. I am one of them.
        withinboredom 4y ago
        I can’t really use VS code for work (PHP support is nonexistent compared to PHPStorm), but I needed to make some changes to a C++ codebase in WSL. VS couldn’t get anything to work, I couldn’t even get it to compile. VS code got compiling and step debugging via gdb working after just a few tweaks to the make file and tasks. Worked like a charm.
- 4y ago

jackpirate 4y ago

I believe you are incorrect. According to wikipedia: > The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. This implies that things that have been around for a short period of time do in fact have a short expected lifespan. You're correct that "A implies B does not mean B implies A as well", but that assumption is not needed.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

I think the Lindy effect can work in reverse. Like if you had a collection 1000 things that are all just invented, then the likelihood would be only a small percentage of them will be around and in use in 50 years. Compared with a collection of 1000 things that have all be in use for 100 years, the percentage of them that will be around in 50 years will be much greater.

toss1 4y ago
Yup, it seems that this 'effect' is simply extrapolating from randomness and averages. Take any random thing and random time (with zero knowledge of actual lifespan), and on average, you are in the middle of it's lifespan. Therefore, if Thing-A has existed for 28 years, it is likely to last for another 28, if Thing-B has existed for 6 years, it's likely to exist for another 6, and so on. It may be somewhat informative for comparisons but not in real life. You are hiking away from a disaster with all your possessions and life's savings in your backpack, and are now at a muddy riverbank needing to cross. You ask me how deep the river is and I tell you the average depth is 6 inches. That sounds great, but I have most definitely NOT told you that you'll be able to get across without finding a deep spot and having to drop your backpack to survive. Using this effect to make judgements about product lifetime is similarly uninformative. It is a hint leading to only a possible inference, not data leading to a valid prediction.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  With respect to software objects, the most likely reasons for their life to end are: 1. Not sufficiently useful relative to involved costs for most applications(data formats, configuration maintenance, etc.) 2. Disrupted by something that is "10x better" for the purpose(e.g. using a spreadsheet instead of a text editor for 2D, cell-oriented data) 3. Outside forces invading the ecosystem and obsoleting dependencies(new OS, hardware, etc.) So what the Lindy effect describes in long-lived software is just the software that is relatively cheap to keep around, is hard to greatly surpass and resists invasion - which describes a lot of "worse-is-better" software, where the UX kinda sucks, and it's actually a bit too unstructured for any particular application, but not enough of these things that anyone cares to address it in the relevant professional scenarios where it comes up: instead the user just girds themselves to fight it into submission because they can spend six hours fighting it and one week debugging it or two weeks making a Right Thing that is much less compatible.

feral 4y ago

Disagree: even in your formulation, no 'quick jump' is needed. Your statement A:"The longer something has been around, the longer it will be around" is not the opposite of B:"the shorter something has been around, the shorter it will be around". Rather they mean the same thing. 'longer' and 'shorter' here are just English language ways of referring to the same time t that an object has been around. If someone tells you "the longer a distance is, the more time it takes to walk it", that is exactly the same as "the shorter a distance is, the less time it takes to walk it"; there's no logical leap there. I could conceive a rule that says "archeological artefacts are likely to be around for a long time" and it'd be a mistake to conclude that this means that non-archelogical artefacts will only be around for a short time. But that doesn't seem to be how the Lindy effect is formulated, either on Wikipedia or on your post, so there doesn't seem to be an error in applying it to new things.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
The real meaning of the Lindy effect is: the more something has been continued to be around due to be continuously and repeatedly selected from a pool of similar other somethings, the longer it will likely continue to be so. Because this is a statistical effect (longer lived things are drawn from a pool of things, some of which are not long lived), you cannot invert it trivially. If there is no selection process, then the Lindy effect is either meaningless, or decomposes to an assertion that the current thing is the only way to do something.
- feral 4y ago
  Ok, so let's say discuss your formulation instead: Why can't we 'invert' it, just because it's statistical effect? Yes, in your formulation, some of the new things in the pool will go on to live a long time, while others will be selected out. But so what? We are talking about the expected lifetime of an item in the pool, conditioned only on it's age. There's no fundamental problem making a statement that this expected lifetime is short for new things, even if some fraction of those new things will last a long time, right? After all, we don't know any one individual item that's been around a long time will last a lot longer. We only know we expect it to. Because even long lived items have finite lifetime, hence they'll eventually die (and when they do it'll be really surprising, because they've been around so long; but it will happen eventually.) And so the statement is always talking about expected lifetime, whether for items that have already lasted a long or short time. (Hence I still don't think there's really any logical 'inversion' here.)

szundi 4y ago

These statements of "longer" and "shorter" actually refers to probabilities. So it makes sense to state when something is not "longer", then it is "shorter". So I disagree, OP's statements about the Lindy effect makes sense. Also someone commented about COBOL. Of course no one thinks COBOL "is around", what also means statistics about usage. COBOL is declining and almost no one uses it anymore, so it is safe to say "it is almost not around".

tarboreus 4y ago
There are 220 billion lines of COBAL in production. Much of the most essential banking infrastructure in the world runs on COBAL, and is likely to indefinitely. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cobol-trends/#:~:text=According%20to%20Reuters%2C%20you%20can,state%20of%20COBOL%20in%202020 https://www.bmc.com/blogs/cobol-trends/#:~:text=According%20.... The only way we stop using COBAL in production this century is to have some kind of apocalypse, or maybe an apotheosis.
- scubbo 4y ago
  Given that the typo was made 3 times (suggesting that it's a misunderstanding, rather than a mistake), hopefully you will take this comment in the educational manner in which it's intended rather than being a snide "gotcha" - it's COBOL, not COBAL.

yarg 4y ago

The Lindy effect states that the expected lifetime of a thing is proportional to its current age. That includes the expectation that something young will be (on average) half way through its lifespan.

monkeybutton 4y ago
Can it also apply to the time until an event which hasn't yet happened? Ie. a system you have never observed crashing before, has been running for T hours. So being on average half way through its lifespan, will probably run another T hours without incident.
- yarg 4y ago
  Not quite. It works based upon the 100% certainty that whatever you are, at some point you will cease to be. On average, regardless of what you are, you are in the middle of your life or existence (some very high variance here). In order to generalise it to non-certain events, such as a program crash, you'd need to remove the certainty assumption and rejig the consequent statistics - it might be doable, but you wouldn't end up with something quite so clean and simple.
  - subjectsigma 4y ago
    I am interested in this topic but never quite understood it. Is there a techincal reason why these organizations don't transpile COBOL to C? I imagine building such a compiler wouldn't be that hard, and even if it is, we've had decades to work on it. Is it more of a process thing (having to change unit tests, code review, hire new people, etc) that prevents this? Or is it just too risky given the important roles of the mainframes?
    - yarg 4y ago
      Wrong comment?
      - 4y ago

Barrin92 4y ago

That's not right. The Lindy argument holds in that case as well, it's just a different version of the doomsday argument. The basis for this kind of reasoning is essentially that, if you can assume that you are an 'average user' (and you don't have reason to believe you're especially late or early), the chance that your prediction about the longevity of the project is correct is most likely to be true if you 1/3 - 3x[1] the lifespan of the project currently. That is because if say, you predicted VsCode existed a hundred times longer than it currently did, that prediction is only true if you are indeed among the first 1%. 99% of VsCode users making that prediction will be wrong. [1]https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VfpAbtj-yOq5gHhYIdgrAIdBuw=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/16680423/Doomsday1.png https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2VfpAbtj-yOq5gHhYIdgrAIdBuw=...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

avindroth 4y ago

> The Lindy effect proposes, simplified, that the longer something has been around, the longer it will probably stay around still. I think there is a linguistic ambiguity here. What is meant by "the longer something has been around"? Longer with respect to what? If you mean to say if A has been around longer than B, then A will stay around longer than B (in expectation), then this law is commutative with respect to A and B and what you specify as "opposite" holds. If you mean to say if something has been around for t then it will stay around for some f(t) where f is an increasing function, then again what you specify as "opposite" holds.

madrox 4y ago

I don't think there's anything in the wording of the Lindy effect that means it's only a one way inference. It says the life expectancy of a thing is proportional to its age. That makes sense to me. If a product is going to die, it's likely to die fast. If a product sticks around five years, it's more likely it'll be around for ten more. It's why startups go under all the time, but you don't hear of a lot of 50 year old companies going out of business. I think the error is interpreting these things literally. If we did, then if it were 1990 we'd say Windows wouldn't be see the next century. Probabilities are attached.

randal_handle 4y ago

The converse of "the longer something has been around, the longer it will probably stay around still" is "the longer something will probably stay around (in the future), the longer it will have already been around (from the past)." The change from longer to shorter is not a logical converse.

dwighttk 4y ago

But a lot more things have only ever been around for a short time. Only a few made it through that “having been around a short time”, stay around longer than expected, and become exceptions to the rule.

samatman 4y ago

This is correct, let me take a crack at explaining why. The Lindy effect is named after a restaurant, Lindy's, which ironically closed recently. If we were to take it as invertible, we would have to conclude that a brand-new restaurant, which opened an hour ago, is most likely to shut down one hour from now. This is an obvious absurdity: if we wish to speculate on the longevity of new things, we can't use the Lindy effect to do so. It's a good heuristic for betting that something will continue, it's a bad heuristic for betting something won't.

bdowling 4y ago
> ... a brand-new restaurant, which opened an hour ago, is most likely to shut down one hour from now. A new restaurant that opened one hour ago existed for months during its planning stages. That restaurant will probably not survive its first few months of business.
lm28469 4y ago
> most likely to shut down one hour from now. Yeah but in an hour it most likely shut down in two hours /s I really don't get the whole argument over this definition, to me it sounds like a funny observation more than a law of the Universe.
- samatman 4y ago
  It's useful if you're trying to decide which is going to last longer, Harvard, or Bob's Quality Education Mill est. 2022. It's not useful if you're trying to decide whether Bob's Education Mill will last longer than the state-funded community college opened in the same year, there are plenty of other heuristics which we might use there, but not this one.
osigurdson 4y ago
Reading through the wiki page, the Lindy effect is not so much about the the restaurant itself. It was initially about a comic's ability to stay relevant by not having too many appearances then later seemingly co-opted by Mandelbrot and Taleb to mean what it does now. Lindy's law is a strange one for sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#cite_note-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect#cite_note-6 https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1964-goldman.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1964-goldman.pdf

catherd 4y ago

Well, that was certainly a successful nerd-snipe.

Aeolun 4y ago

There are 1000 things that have been around for 1 year. There are 10 things that have been around for 10 years. I think it’s safe to say that there is less chance of any individual thing that’s 1 year old being around in 1 year than the things that have already survived for 10.

skybrian 4y ago
Well, yes, but that's the outside view, based on knowing very little. If you know more than just the age, often you can get better estimates.

ascar 4y ago

> In other words, A implies B does not mean B implies A as well. I think you wanted to write A implies B does not mean "not A" implies "not B" as well. B implies A would be: the longer something will probably stay around, the longer it already has been around.