Lindy effect

The Lindy effect is a theory of the life expectancy of non-perishable things that posits for a certain class of nonperishables, like a technology or an idea, every additional day may imply a longer (remaining) life expectancy:^[1] the mortality rate decreases with time. This contrasts with living creatures and mechanical things, which instead follow a bathtub curve, where every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy (though longer overall life expectancy, due to surviving this far): after childhood, the mortality rate increases with time.

Origin

The origin of the term and idea can be traced to Albert Goldman and a 1964 article he had written in The New Republic titled "Lindy's Law'.^[2] In it he stated that "the future career expectations of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his past exposure on the medium". The term Lindy refers to the NY Deli Lindy's where comedians "foregather every night at Lindy's, where... they conduct post-mortems on recent show biz "action".^[3] Benoit Mandelbrot formally coined the term Lindy Effect in his 1984 Book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.^[4] Mandelbrot expressed mathematically that for certain things bounded by the life of the producer, like human promise, future life expectancy is proportional to the past. He references Lindy's Law and a parable of the young poets’ cemetery and then applies to researchers and their publications: “However long a person’s past collected works, it will on the average continue for an equal additional amount. When it eventually stops, it breaks off at precisely half of its promise.“

Nassim Taleb furthered the idea in the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by extending to a certain class of nonperishables where life expectancy can be expressed as power laws.

With human projects and ventures we have another story. These are often scalable, as I said in Chapter 3. With scalable variables… you will witness the exact opposite effect. Let's say a project is expected to terminate in 79 days, the same expectation in days as the newborn female has in years. On the 79th day, if the project is not finished, it will be expected to take another 25 days to complete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not completed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it should have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expected to need an extra 1,590 days. As you see, the longer you wait, the longer you will be expected to wait ^[5]

In Taleb's book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder he for the first time explicitly referred to his idea as the Lindy Effect, removed the bounds of the life of the producer to include anything that doesn't have a natural upper bounds and incorporated it into his broader theory of the Antifragile.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not “aging” like persons, but “aging” in reverse. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy. This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life! ^[6]

Mandelbrot agreed with Taleb's expanded definition of the Lindy Effect: "[Taleb] suggested the boundary perishable/nonperishable and he [Mandelbrot] agreed that the nonperishable would be powerlaw distributed while the perishable (the initial Lindy story) worked as a mere metaphor."^[7]

The Lindy effect is a more general form of the later Copernican principle, in the sense the generalized Doomsday argument by J. Richard Gott.^[8] This states that the future life expectancy is equal to the current age, not simply proportional, and is based on a simpler argument that, barring additional evidence, something is halfway through its life span.

Usage

The Lindy Effect "... allows us to figure out how time and things work without quite getting inside the complexity of time’s mind. Time is scientifically equivalent to disorder, and things that gain from disorder are what this author [Taleb] calls “antifragile.”" ^[9] So things that have been in existence for a long period of time can be considered more robust/antifragile (i.e., more likely to continue to survive) than new things that haven't passed the test of time. Given this, the Lindy Effect can be used to distinguish random survivors from non-random survivors and gauge the fragility of a thing which provides information that can help with decision making. For example:

• Origin of New Diseases: Diseases that have no deep historical traceability are likely to be either diseases of modernity or not diseases at all, but invented conditions.
• Reading Guide: Books that have been in existence for hundreds of years are likely to be in existence for hundreds of years more. In other words, reading things that are new are more likely to become instantly obsolete and therefore reading books that have been in existence for a long time is a better use of one's limited reading time.
• Burden of Evidence: For things that have survived for a long time and hence are expected to survive for a long time (e.g., nature), when challenged, the burden of evidence is not on the thing that survived but on the thing disrupting it
• Books: Physical books are more robust than electronic documents as electronic file formats common ten years ago are no longer accessible today whereas physical books from hundred of years ago can still be read.
• Policy Setting: Certain professions deemed by a society as undesirable but have survived the test of time (prostitution, bookmaking, etc.) should be managed via policy rather than prohibited by policy.
• Project Management: Given the life expectancy of a project grows exponentially (up to an upper bound point of cost, etc.), use tinkering (continuous, repetitive, small, and localized mistakes) as a method to mitigate project schedule risks.
• College / University subjects: Learning subjects that have been around for a few centuries such as Philosophy, Mathematics, Engineering and Natural Sciences over new modern subjects like Social Sciences, Business etc.
• Investing: Companies that have been around the longest will last the longest, and vice versa. Investors can use the Lindy Effect to narrow down the stock universe to the most durable companies.^[10]

Related adages

• Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
• Ninety-ninety rule: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
• Nothing succeeds like success. (Multiple attributions)
• He who does not have a past has no present or future. (Arabic proverb)
• I knew the record would stand until it was broken. (Yogi Berra)
• Man's most prudent counselor is time. (Publilius Syrus)
• There is nothing which the lapse of time will not either extinguish or improve. (Publilius Syrus)
• Those who do not forget the past are masters of the future. (Sima Qian)
• For time destroys the fictions of error and opinion, while it confirms the determinations of nature and of truth. (Marcus Tullius Cicero)

See also

• Survivorship curve
• Survivorship bias
• Planning fallacy
• Ergodic theory
• Law of large numbers
• Precautionary principle
• German tank problem

References

External links

• 'Endeavour – Blog of John Cook' December 2012