6 ms·

I like to use the Lindy effect as an everyday heuristic, quite often for choosing what books to read. That is: if a book has been highly relevant, say, for the

by marttt 3y ago

I like to use the Lindy effect as an everyday heuristic, quite often for choosing what books to read. That is: if a book has been highly relevant, say, for the past 20 years, it may have considerable relevance 20 years from today as well. Conclusion: I will think about buying that physical book for my home library, so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of "classics" from many eras by the time they reach young adulthood. As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. Usually, one is not in a hurry with reading a book; also, new books can be really well marketed these days, which always makes me cautious. It seems to make more sense to read a book 5-10 years after it was first released. The Lindy effect does seem to hold true when I think about e.g. SICP, K&R's C book -- or Kernighan et al's 1988 AWK book for which the authors release a second edition in October this year! [1] Not to mention classic books in fiction or philosophy. Or cultural memes and ideas -- as a rough heuristic, the Lindy effect does often seem to hold true with these as well. It is a fun and extremely useful thinking tool for longer-term everyday prognostics. 1: https://www.awk.dev/ https://www.awk.dev/

adamnemecek 3y ago
[flagged]
- kqr 3y ago
  By what metric? The Lindy effect is concerned with survival, which is affected to a large degree by, in this case, memetic fitness, which these books have in spades.
  - adamnemecek 3y ago
    By the quality of the book.
- kimi 3y ago
  I believe K&R is a wonderful introduction to C - "wonderful" as in "let's open the editor and try this". It's well written, simple, and you are left with the feeling that someone just gave you a Jedi weapon. It took a while for us as a community to realize that such a Jedi weapon can easily slice your fingers off, because before the internet the worst that would happen is "it crashed again" but that was kind of normal.
- dlkf 3y ago
  I love that someone has this take, but I think you should elaborate. In what sense are they terrible? Why do they experience sustained popularity? What does this tell us about Lindy?
  - adamnemecek 3y ago
    That people confuse Lindyness with quality.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  K&R 2nd edition is an excellent book, not just as a historical artefact, but as actual literature (not joking, it's very entertaining to read).
kjellsbells 3y ago
There's an implicit value judgment there though: would you stick a book that exhibited the Lindy effect even if you fundamentally disapproved of it. For example: the King James English Bible is surely very high on the Lindyness scale, massively influential, and on that basis deserves a place on every educated reader's library: but its also the source of bigotry, suffering and death for thousands of people. Do you stock it, or no?
- j7ake 3y ago
  The bible is a hugely influential book. It is probably the most referenced book in western literature, art, and history. Reading a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises. One must also judge a book by their historical context.
  - extragood 3y ago
    My AP Lit teacher in high school encouraged us to read the bible - not for any type of religious reason - but because it is so frequently referenced by western literature, especially in older texts. If you don't pick up on the biblical allegories when reading something like Shakespeare then you'll miss critical details.
    - hyperthesis 3y ago
      Every page of the KJB seems to have a phrase that has entered the language (e.g. give up the ghost) - though I can't be sure that those phrases weren't already popular and merely recorded.
      - actionfromafar 3y ago
        If they were popular before, chanches are they were popular because of influence from older versions of the Bible.
      - kawhah 3y ago
        Umm, no. There is a huge selection bias at work here. Most people, when they read the bible, read Genesis and Exodus, the Gospels, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and a couple of other books. It is true that lots of phrases, images, stories, quotations and so on from those heavy-hitting parts of the Bible have made their way into the general culture. The vast majority of the Bible is not at all influential on either our religious understanding or on general culture. Partly because most of it just isn't that commonly read. The popular parts are read thousands of times more commonly than the least popular parts, and many of the readers of the least popular parts (in our era) are people who have a deep religious commitment to reading the Bible, but who aren't necessarily prolific writers or influential thinkers. The other fact at play here is that most of the unread parts are unread for a reason. There is a lot of material which is, of course, of historical or theological interest to experts, and which had undeniable spiritual significance to many people who lived long ago, but which is very hard for most modern readers to extract any real meaning or value from. Some examples - each of these is taken not from the really obscure books, but from 'second-tier books', in order to demonstrate how quickly the long tail of Bible literature descends to filler. The book of Numbers (part of the Pentateuch/Torah) mainly consists of pages and pages listing how many animals of different types should be sacrificed in various ways for different festivals. This is extremely repetitive stuff, pretty much beyond satire. There is no justification given for any of this doctrine, and once you have extracted a minimal amount of historical content ("it seems like cattle were more valuable than sheep!") it's on a par with reading the telephone book. The book of Proverbs sounds fun, but do you know any of the proverbs it contains? Probably not many, because they consist of dozens of very small variations on the same message to embrace wisdom, as though there were some doubt about the advantages of wisdom. Sample: "Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence." The catchy phrasing and apt metaphors which you would hope for simply aren't here (barring a very small number, which stand out as being slightly less banal: "iron sharpens iron"). A couple of the Epistles of St Paul are deeply uplifting and moving pronouncements of the essence of belief in Christ. The rest (circa 20 books) are probably fascinating political history, if you have the background knowledge about the different early Christian thinkers and communities and the evolution of their doctrine. If you don't, they are hard to make much sense of - for example, thirty pages of careful analytic debate about circumcision, responding to someone else's letter which itself breaks down a third person's arguments, neither of which we have available to us. The awkward truth about the notion of the 'Bible as literature' or the supposed cultural importance of the Bible, is that in modern secular times, it is a myth passed on from otherwise educated people who have read less than 5% of the Bible, to other educated people who are going to read even less of it.
jrflowers 3y ago
> As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. I like this strategy because it maximizes the value you get out of old books while you minimize the value of new books. A phenomenal and important book could be published today but the optimal strategy is to die before the Lindy effect becomes apparent and let another generation enjoy its value. This makes sense because books have a finite value that is divisible by the number of readers they get.
- zogrodea 3y ago
  Why do you think books have a finite value divisible by the number of readers they get? That sounds like a very odd claim to me. Let's say there are two universes U1 and U2 and a book A which is identical in both. In U1, book A gets 100 readers, while the same book in U2 gets 1000 readers. I think most people would say that the book has the same value in both universes, independent of how many read it. Maybe your thought process involves the physical condition of a book (there is more wear and tear as it passes through more readers), but I'd like to understand your point of view.
  - bdsa 3y ago
    I'm fairly confident they're being sarcastic
    - zogrodea 3y ago
      Oh, I see. It flew over my head (have autism and there's a tendency for some of us to detect sarcasm badly). Thanks for the clarification.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
You overfit for classics and skip on maybe very entertaining contemporary reads. Feels weird to me to hipster out on the "I build a library of classics only". With this approach you'd never read Dark Matter, which is one of my favorites in the past few years. I also don't care about rankings, top sellers etc. etc., but contemporary stuff is still worth the read. Feels very weird to me tbh.
- marttt 3y ago
  Not considering myself a hipster. I'm closely following new releases on several fields (including experimental fiction and contemporary philosophy), but I like to wait -- typically some years -- before I really read them.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Fair enough
- Yodel0914 3y ago
  You're not wrong, which is why for me longevity is only one of the factors that goes into my book select - but it is a big one. The thing is, we have so much brilliant art and literature available that you need to filter it somehow. The likelihood that something released this year is better than something that has been heralded and great for 100 years is very, very low. Not impossible, mind you. I've definitely read modern books that have had a huge impact on me (including, ironically, Taleb, who introduced me to the Lindy effect), and art and music have a certain cultural context that can make modern expressions more relevant.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    I agree! There are so many classics that are just a pain in the ass to read (looking at you Faust) and just plain suck. But I do love to read some of them sometimes. I just sell my books quite frequently and keep only the ones that resonated with me. I'll also buy books after having read them as an ebook
- 3y ago
somedude895 3y ago
Same with films and videogames. With books and films it's probably more the current Zeitgeist that doesn't agree with me, so if something's hyped up I tend to think it's probably due to the current social activism (which I believe won't age well) permeating everything. There is more than enough media from the past hundred years that has stood the test of time.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
> so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of "classics" from many eras by the time they reach young adulthood. I have that. My three adult children read none of them.

by marttt 3y ago

adamnemecek 3y ago

[flagged]

kqr 3y ago
By what metric? The Lindy effect is concerned with survival, which is affected to a large degree by, in this case, memetic fitness, which these books have in spades.
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  By the quality of the book.
kimi 3y ago
I believe K&R is a wonderful introduction to C - "wonderful" as in "let's open the editor and try this". It's well written, simple, and you are left with the feeling that someone just gave you a Jedi weapon. It took a while for us as a community to realize that such a Jedi weapon can easily slice your fingers off, because before the internet the worst that would happen is "it crashed again" but that was kind of normal.
dlkf 3y ago
I love that someone has this take, but I think you should elaborate. In what sense are they terrible? Why do they experience sustained popularity? What does this tell us about Lindy?
- adamnemecek 3y ago
  That people confuse Lindyness with quality.
flohofwoe 3y ago
K&R 2nd edition is an excellent book, not just as a historical artefact, but as actual literature (not joking, it's very entertaining to read).

kjellsbells 3y ago

There's an implicit value judgment there though: would you stick a book that exhibited the Lindy effect even if you fundamentally disapproved of it. For example: the King James English Bible is surely very high on the Lindyness scale, massively influential, and on that basis deserves a place on every educated reader's library: but its also the source of bigotry, suffering and death for thousands of people. Do you stock it, or no?

j7ake 3y ago
The bible is a hugely influential book. It is probably the most referenced book in western literature, art, and history. Reading a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises. One must also judge a book by their historical context.
- extragood 3y ago
  My AP Lit teacher in high school encouraged us to read the bible - not for any type of religious reason - but because it is so frequently referenced by western literature, especially in older texts. If you don't pick up on the biblical allegories when reading something like Shakespeare then you'll miss critical details.
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    Every page of the KJB seems to have a phrase that has entered the language (e.g. give up the ghost) - though I can't be sure that those phrases weren't already popular and merely recorded.
    - actionfromafar 3y ago
      If they were popular before, chanches are they were popular because of influence from older versions of the Bible.
    - kawhah 3y ago
      Umm, no. There is a huge selection bias at work here. Most people, when they read the bible, read Genesis and Exodus, the Gospels, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and a couple of other books. It is true that lots of phrases, images, stories, quotations and so on from those heavy-hitting parts of the Bible have made their way into the general culture. The vast majority of the Bible is not at all influential on either our religious understanding or on general culture. Partly because most of it just isn't that commonly read. The popular parts are read thousands of times more commonly than the least popular parts, and many of the readers of the least popular parts (in our era) are people who have a deep religious commitment to reading the Bible, but who aren't necessarily prolific writers or influential thinkers. The other fact at play here is that most of the unread parts are unread for a reason. There is a lot of material which is, of course, of historical or theological interest to experts, and which had undeniable spiritual significance to many people who lived long ago, but which is very hard for most modern readers to extract any real meaning or value from. Some examples - each of these is taken not from the really obscure books, but from 'second-tier books', in order to demonstrate how quickly the long tail of Bible literature descends to filler. The book of Numbers (part of the Pentateuch/Torah) mainly consists of pages and pages listing how many animals of different types should be sacrificed in various ways for different festivals. This is extremely repetitive stuff, pretty much beyond satire. There is no justification given for any of this doctrine, and once you have extracted a minimal amount of historical content ("it seems like cattle were more valuable than sheep!") it's on a par with reading the telephone book. The book of Proverbs sounds fun, but do you know any of the proverbs it contains? Probably not many, because they consist of dozens of very small variations on the same message to embrace wisdom, as though there were some doubt about the advantages of wisdom. Sample: "Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence." The catchy phrasing and apt metaphors which you would hope for simply aren't here (barring a very small number, which stand out as being slightly less banal: "iron sharpens iron"). A couple of the Epistles of St Paul are deeply uplifting and moving pronouncements of the essence of belief in Christ. The rest (circa 20 books) are probably fascinating political history, if you have the background knowledge about the different early Christian thinkers and communities and the evolution of their doctrine. If you don't, they are hard to make much sense of - for example, thirty pages of careful analytic debate about circumcision, responding to someone else's letter which itself breaks down a third person's arguments, neither of which we have available to us. The awkward truth about the notion of the 'Bible as literature' or the supposed cultural importance of the Bible, is that in modern secular times, it is a myth passed on from otherwise educated people who have read less than 5% of the Bible, to other educated people who are going to read even less of it.

jrflowers 3y ago

> As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. I like this strategy because it maximizes the value you get out of old books while you minimize the value of new books. A phenomenal and important book could be published today but the optimal strategy is to die before the Lindy effect becomes apparent and let another generation enjoy its value. This makes sense because books have a finite value that is divisible by the number of readers they get.

zogrodea 3y ago
Why do you think books have a finite value divisible by the number of readers they get? That sounds like a very odd claim to me. Let's say there are two universes U1 and U2 and a book A which is identical in both. In U1, book A gets 100 readers, while the same book in U2 gets 1000 readers. I think most people would say that the book has the same value in both universes, independent of how many read it. Maybe your thought process involves the physical condition of a book (there is more wear and tear as it passes through more readers), but I'd like to understand your point of view.
- bdsa 3y ago
  I'm fairly confident they're being sarcastic
  - zogrodea 3y ago
    Oh, I see. It flew over my head (have autism and there's a tendency for some of us to detect sarcasm badly). Thanks for the clarification.

RamblingCTO 3y ago

You overfit for classics and skip on maybe very entertaining contemporary reads. Feels weird to me to hipster out on the "I build a library of classics only". With this approach you'd never read Dark Matter, which is one of my favorites in the past few years. I also don't care about rankings, top sellers etc. etc., but contemporary stuff is still worth the read. Feels very weird to me tbh.

marttt 3y ago
Not considering myself a hipster. I'm closely following new releases on several fields (including experimental fiction and contemporary philosophy), but I like to wait -- typically some years -- before I really read them.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Fair enough
Yodel0914 3y ago
You're not wrong, which is why for me longevity is only one of the factors that goes into my book select - but it is a big one. The thing is, we have so much brilliant art and literature available that you need to filter it somehow. The likelihood that something released this year is better than something that has been heralded and great for 100 years is very, very low. Not impossible, mind you. I've definitely read modern books that have had a huge impact on me (including, ironically, Taleb, who introduced me to the Lindy effect), and art and music have a certain cultural context that can make modern expressions more relevant.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  I agree! There are so many classics that are just a pain in the ass to read (looking at you Faust) and just plain suck. But I do love to read some of them sometimes. I just sell my books quite frequently and keep only the ones that resonated with me. I'll also buy books after having read them as an ebook
3y ago

somedude895 3y ago

Same with films and videogames. With books and films it's probably more the current Zeitgeist that doesn't agree with me, so if something's hyped up I tend to think it's probably due to the current social activism (which I believe won't age well) permeating everything. There is more than enough media from the past hundred years that has stood the test of time.

kwhitefoot 3y ago

> so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of "classics" from many eras by the time they reach young adulthood. I have that. My three adult children read none of them.