Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tho…
I'm fairly confident they're being sarcastic
The Lindy Effect
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: The Lindy Effect
#62I 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…
Re: The Lindy Effect
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, we are too kind to some classics out of nostalgia perhaps. I've been greatly disappointed by top rated classic spy and sci-fi novels. The kind of storytelling people got away with 50 years ago really doesn't work anymore today. Think of bad pacing, characters without depth, lazy stereotyping, deus ex machinas. So on the one hand recency bias results in us giving undue attention to new books. On the other hand w…
Re: The Lindy Effect
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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
Re: The Lindy Effect
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#67“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
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I'd stock Koran too. Satanic Verses by Rushdie would also be included. If I can have access to Mein Kampf, to the library it goes.
"Mein Kampf" is actually a good example of the "negative" Lindy effect because it was only relevant in a single country for a very short time, and even in Nazi Germany it was only popular (in the sense that there was a copy in every household) because it was given out as wedding gift by the state (pretty much nobody could be arsed to actually buy and read that drivel when it came out).
This is of course dwarfed by the number of copies distributed after the Nazis came to power.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#69Earlier 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…
Yes. I'd stock Koran too. Satanic Verses by Rushdie would also be included. If I can have access to Mein Kampf, to the library it goes.
Re: The Lindy Effect
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, we are too kind to some classics out of nostalgia perhaps. I've been greatly disappointed by top rated classic spy and sci-fi novels. The kind of storytelling people got away with 50 years ago really doesn't work anymore today. Think of bad pacing, characters without depth, lazy stereotyping, deus ex machinas. So on the one hand recency bias results in us giving undue attention to new books. On the other hand w…
Yeah, I've struggled with this a lot -- e.g. still having trouble reading the works of Dostoevsky because of those endless walking-in-the-park-and-philosophising dialogues. These seem alien in my time and culture.
I suppose you have to sense the characteristics of that 50-year-old language -- and see the universal, timeless ideas behind that language. Language is a tool, a form. It does change quite a bit in 50 (or 100) years, whereas the general ideas change much less IMO. To a large degree, this is a "seeing forest for the trees" thing.