Lindy effect
Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence, or competition, and greater odds of continued existence into the future.
[2] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time.
Mathematically, the Lindy effect corresponds to lifetimes following a Pareto probability distribution.
[5][6][1] Nassim Nicholas Taleb has expressed the Lindy effect in terms of "distance from an absorbing barrier".
[7] The Lindy effect applies to "non-perishable" items, those that do not have an "unavoidable expiration date".
[2] For example, human beings are perishable: the life expectancy at birth in developed countries is about 80 years.
The origin of the term can be traced to Albert Goldman and a 1964 article he had written in The New Republic titled "Lindy's Law.
In this article, Goldman describes a folkloric belief among New York City media observers that the amount of material comedians have is constant, and therefore, the frequency of output predicts how long their series will last:[8] ... the life expectancy of a television comedian is [inversely] proportional to the total amount of his exposure on the medium.
If, pathetically deluded by hubris, he undertakes a regular weekly or even monthly program, his chances of survival beyond the first season are slight; but if he adopts the conservation of resources policy favored by these senescent philosophers of "the Business," and confines himself to "specials" and "guest shots," he may last to the age of Ed Wynn [d. age 79 in 1966 while still acting in movies]Benoit Mandelbrot defined a different concept with the same name in his 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
[5] In Mandelbrot's version, comedians do not have a fixed amount of comedic material to spread over TV appearances, but rather, the more appearances they make, the more future appearances they are predicted to make: 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.
"[5] In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2012 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 which doesn't have a natural upper bound, and incorporated it into his broader theory of the Antifragile.
Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.
[9] According to Taleb, Mandelbrot agreed with the expanded definition of the Lindy Effect: "I [Taleb] suggested the boundary perishable/nonperishable and he [Mandelbrot] agreed that the nonperishable would be power-law distributed while the perishable (the initial Lindy story) worked as a mere metaphor.
"[10] Taleb further defined the term in Skin in the Game, where he linked Lindy with fragility, disorder and time.
"[11] As time operates through "skin in the game," Taleb believes that "[t]hings that have survived are hinting to us ‘ex post’ that they have some robustness."
"[11] He further states that the Lindy effect in itself is "Lindy-proof," citing the words of pre-Socratic philosopher Periander ("Use laws that are old but food that is fresh") and Alfonso X of Castile ("Burn old logs.
Skallas promotes a lifestyle inspired by the Lindy effect, an eclectic mix of Mediterranean writers such as Plutarch and Thomas Aquinas, and the presumed lifestyles of Mediterranean peoples.
Writing for The New York Times, Ezra Marcus notes that Skallas' approach to the Lindy effect breaks with Taleb's statistical analysis by focusing on lifestyle topics such as diet, dating, and exercise.
[12] Mathematically, the relation postulated by the Lindy effect can be expressed as the following statement about a random variable T corresponding to the lifetime of the object (e.g. a comedy show), which is assumed to take values in the range
Here the left hand side denotes the conditional expectation of the remaining lifetime
on the right hand side (called "Lindy proportion" by Iddo Eliazar) is a positive constant.
[1] Iddo Eliazar has proposed an alternative formulation of Lindy's Law involving the median instead of the mean (expected value) of the remaining lifetime
