The Lindy Effect
arxiv.org
The Lindy Effect
1–10 of 88 posts
Re: The Lindy Effect
#2“Tried and true”
Re: The Lindy Effect
#3There's a subset of this I think about sometimes, not sure if it's actually a thing or been looked at/is valid.
Let's say I'm waiting for a package to arrive and it's late. As each minute passes, does the chance of it coming the very next minute increase or decrease?
One could say it increases because since it will eventually come and I have passed all the previous minutes they haven't come, then the remaining minutes until it comes comprise a smaller percentage of the all the remaining minutes, increasing the chance each minute.
However up to a certain point the chance may decrease, as in, if it is "late" in a substantial sense, whatever caused it being something that delayed it a significant amount of time increases as time elapses, as the chances of it being something small that caused the lateness decreases as each minute passes.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#4> One implication is that even things which are becoming less robust over time can display the Lindy effect.
Interesting. And somewhat counterintuitive.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#5Re: The Lindy Effect
#6There's a subset of this I think about sometimes, not sure if it's actually a thing or been looked at/is valid. Let's say I'm waiting for a package to arrive and it's late. As each minute passes, does the chance of it coming the very next minute increase or decrease? One could say it increases because since it will eventually come and I have passed all the previous minutes they haven't come, then the remaining minute…
And you can model this through two survival functions, one thin-tailed and one heavy-tailed. As time increases, whatever your initial probability of "package will be very late" it will be dwarfed by the posterior after evidence of a long waiting time.
It's the exact same technique used in https://two-wrongs.com/forecasting-covid-19-variants.html except applied to "packages that may be late" instead.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#7“Tried and true”
Sayings about how old things are surprisingly effective:
"Don't knock it till you try it" "Chesterton's fence" "Reinventing the wheel"
Any others?
Re: The Lindy Effect
#8“Tried and true”
Sayings about how old things are surprisingly effective: "Don't knock it till you try it" "Chesterton's fence" "Reinventing the wheel" Any others?
“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
“better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”
“old is gold”
“stood the test of time”
Re: The Lindy Effect
#9I 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.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#10There's a subset of this I think about sometimes, not sure if it's actually a thing or been looked at/is valid. Let's say I'm waiting for a package to arrive and it's late. As each minute passes, does the chance of it coming the very next minute increase or decrease? One could say it increases because since it will eventually come and I have passed all the previous minutes they haven't come, then the remaining minute…
> it will eventually come
It might also never come.
Sometimes packages just disappear in transit.
Maybe it lost its label.
Maybe it got broken.
Maybe someone stole it.
Etc.
My experience with packages goes like:
- Most often things I order in my own country or from a neighbouring country arrive exactly on the expected day, or at least the next business day after that. This makes sense because shorter travel has less opportunity for things to go wrong.
- Things from far away have their estimate set for like 60 days from now, because no one knows what boat it will end up etc. Sometimes these things show up quickly. Most of the time it takes a while, but still it arrives before the long estimate date. Sometimes they show up a bit late.
- If they are very delayed then in both cases it means the package is just gone and will never arrive. So I inform the platform that the package was lost in transit and they refund the purchase.