Lindy Effect

Practicalsystemsculturetechnology

Etymology

Named for Lindy’s, a New York delicatessen where comedians reasoned that the longer a Broadway show had already run, the longer it would keep running. Benoit Mandelbrot formalized the idea and Nassim Taleb popularized it. The name is an eponym drawn from that place.

  1. noun phrase · /LIN-dee ih-FEKT/

    For non-perishable things like ideas, books, or technologies, the longer they have already survived, the longer they are likely to last.

    What it names

    A heuristic for betting on durability: age is evidence of robustness, so a hundred-year-old book or tool is a safer bet to endure another decade than this year’s sensation.

    Example

    For learning statistics I trust a Lindy effect and read the textbook that’s been in print for forty years, not the buzzy new one.

    Related idea

    A cousin of antifragility (both Taleb’s): the Lindy effect predicts longevity from survival, while antifragility is the property of actually gaining strength from disorder — one is a forecast, the other a mechanism.

See also

AntifragilityHalf-LifePerennialSurvivorship bias