An Expert Called Lindy

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 9, 2017 at 11:58:09 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] An Expert Called Lindy
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> An Expert Called Lindy
> Don’t eat their cheesecake– Meta-experts judged by meta-meta-experts– Prostitutes, nonprostitutes, and amateurs –
> By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
> Jan 9 2017
> <https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf>
>
> Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has 
> been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that 
> developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, 
> say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two 
> hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.
>
> Let me warn the reader: while the Lindy effect is one of the most useful, robust, and universal heuristics I know, 
> the cheesecake is… much less distinguished. Odds are the deli will not survive, by the Lindy Effect.
>
> There had been a bevy of mathematical models that sort of fit the story, though not really, until yours truly figured 
> out that the Lindy Effect can be best proved using the theory of fragility and anti-fragility. Actually the theory of 
> fragility directly leads to the Lindy Effect. Simply, my collaborators and I managed to define fragility as 
> sensitivity to disorder: the porcelain owl sitting in front of me on the writing desk, as I am writing these lines, 
> wants tranquility. It dislikes shocks, disorder, variations, earthquakes, mishandling by dust-phobic cleaning service 
> operators, travel in a suitcase transiting through Terminal 5 in Heathrow, and shelling by Saudi Barbaria-sponsored 
> Islamist militias. Clearly, it has no upside from random events and, more generally, disorder. (More technically, 
> being fragile, it necessarily has a nonlinear reaction to stressors: up until its breaking point, shocks of larger 
> intensity affect it disproportionally more than smaller ones).
>
> Now, crucially, time is equivalent to disorder and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously 
> call survival, is ability to handle disorder.
>
> Is fragile what has an asymmetric response to volatility and other stressors, that is, will experience more harm than 
> benefit from it.
>
> The idea of fragility helped put some rigor around the notion that the only effective judge of things is time –by 
> things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. You can’t fool 
> Lindy: books of the type written by the current hotshot Op-Ed writer at the New York Times may get some hype at 
> publication time, manufactured or spontaneous, but their five year survival is generally inferior to that of 
> pancreatic cancer.
>
> And the operation of time is necessarily done through skin in the game. Without skin in the game, via contact with 
> reality, the mechanism of fragility is disrupted: things may survive for no reason for a while, then ultimately 
> collapse causing a lot of side harm.
>
> A few more details –for those interested in the intricacies, the Lindy Effect has been covered at length in 
> Antifragile. There are two ways things handle time. First, there is aging and perishability: things die because they 
> may have a biological clock, what we call senescence. Second, there is hazard, the rate of accidents. What we witness 
> in physical life is the combination of the two: when you are old and fragile, you don’t handle accidents very well. 
> These accidents don’t have to be external, like falling from a ladder or being attacked by a bear; they can also be 
> internal, from random malfunctioning of your organs or circulation. On the other hand, animals that don’t really age, 
> say turtles and crocodiles, seem to have a life expectancy that remains constant for a long time.
>
> Only the nonperishable can be Lindy-compatible. When it comes to ideas, books, technologies, procedures, 
> institutions, political systems, there is no intrinsic aging and perishability. A physical copy of War and Peace can 
> age (particularly when the publisher cuts corner to save 20 cents on paper for a $50 book); the book itself as an 
> idea doesn’t.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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