TB: Lindy Effect

For non-perishable things (ideas, technologies, institutions, art forms), life expectancy scales with age: the longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to continue surviving. A book that has been in print for 100 years will probably be in print for another 100; a book published last year has no such expectation.

The Lindy Effect is a heuristic for evaluating durability under uncertainty. New is not better by default — novelty is a risk factor, not a virtue, for non-perishable things. Anything that has survived a long time has already been stress-tested by the world in ways you cannot simulate. Ancient medical wisdom, classical texts, time-tested technologies, and long-standing institutions all deserve more epistemic credit than their apparent simplicity or age suggests. Conversely, the hottest new thing in any field is statistically more likely to be forgotten than celebrated, because most new things don't survive.

• Antifragile (Taleb): the Lindy Effect as a core heuristic — what has been around for a long time will be around for a long time; modern medicine should be humble before ancient nutritional wisdom that has survived millennia; the "via negativa" of using what has Lindy-survived
• The Black Swan (Taleb): the problem of predicting tail events; the Lindy Effect is Taleb's empirical heuristic for navigating tail-risk uncertainty — trust duration, not models

• Antifragility — Lindy things are often antifragile: they have been strengthened by surviving shocks
• Skin in the Game — Lindy survivors have proven their durability with real-world stakes
• Survivorship Bias — Lindy is partially about survivorship; the caveat is that some Lindy survivors are there by luck not robustness