11–20 of 88 posts
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…
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…
[flagged]
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.
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…
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?
There'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…
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…
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 sto…
Reading a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises.
One must also judge a book by their historical context.
E[X | X >= a] = 2 * a
“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?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Hea...
When picking a tech stack for a software investment and you want a reasonable expectation that it will still be actively maintained 10 years from now, you need to go back in time by 10 years. I’ve found this 10 years time horizon a useful one to work with, based on version histories of various bits of software I build upon. For example, for Python, this takes me back to version 3.4, before type decorators and many other things hit the scene that I disapprove of. So now, I test all my code with both version 3.4 and the newest version (3.11). I won’t use language features from 3.11 that weren’t already there in 3.4, and I won’t use code in 3.4 that breaks or throws deprecation warnings in 3.11. I also apply this test to dependencies, paying close attention to what happens if I try to get the newest version of some Python library running on version 3.4 of the interpreter or a 10-year-old version of the library on version 3.11 of the interpreter.
This means my code is engineered so that it could have been in continuous operation for the last 10 years while running continuous updates on what’s underneath it. And this gives me a reasonable expectation that my code will require only minimal code changes over the next 10 years to keep up with whatever might arise.
With the python interpreter itself, it’s remarkably easy to do that. I feel it doesn’t limit my coding in any meaningful way. With other bits of software, including many python libraries that one might depend on, it would be absolutely unworkable. In such a case, I take that as a clear signal not to use the dependency at all. This is a lot of work, but also a good forcing function that prevents me from becoming a dependency hog myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sto…
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.
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…
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 sto…
Not sure about stocking e.g. Mein Kampf, though. This one I would probably pass, due to disgust towards what the Nazis did. From another angle, I might be "brainwashed" here -- by the cultural meme that this is a Dangerous Book. I don't really know. In the end, it is still just a book. Can a book be dangerous in itself? Not sure that possessing it would turn somebody into a Nazi; a youngster's appreciation of those ideas is surely more complicated a mechanism than just reading a book.
Tangentially related: in my (post-soviet) country, there has been discussion whether former Soviet military buildings are a part of cultural heritage, or should they all be demolished. As a regular person, I'm definitely siding with keeping some of those buildings -- the Soviet occupation was a sad, devastating part of our past, and younger generations should have physical examples of what it was like. Whether those buildings will be used as some kind of cult objects etc -- this is a matter of values education at school or at home.
So I fully agree with @j7ake's comment in this thread that reading (or -- my addition -- possessing) a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises. Hiding the past won't work, I think.
Great angle @kjellsbells, though. Interesting to think about. Thanks for bringing this up.