Lindy effect

The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life
expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age.
Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the
present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. 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.

The concept is named after Lindy's delicatessen in New York City, where the concept was informally
theorized by comedians.[3][4] The Lindy effect has subsequently been theorized by mathematicians and
statisticians.[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. So the Lindy effect does not apply to individual human lifespan: it is unlikely for a 5-year-
old human to die within the next 5 years, but it is very likely for a 70-year-old human to die within the next
70 years, while the Lindy effect would predict these to have equal probability.

History
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".[3][4] The term Lindy refers to Lindy's delicatessen in New
York, where comedians "foregather every night [to] conduct post-
mortems on recent show business 'action'". 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 Lindy's delicatessen at Broadway
last:[8] and 51st St in New York City

...  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. When it eventually stops, it breaks off at precisely half of its promise."[5]

Nassim Taleb presented a version of Mandelbrot's idea in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable by extending it to a certain class of non-perishables 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.[6]

In 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.

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! [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]

Mathematical formulation
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 (with a lower bound ):[1]
Here the left hand side denotes the conditional expectation of the remaining lifetime , given that
has exceeded , and the parameter on the right hand side (called "Lindy proportion" by Iddo Eliazar) is a
positive constant.[1]

This is equivalent to the survival function of T being

which has the hazard function

This means that the lifetime follows a Pareto distribution (a power-law distribution) with exponent
.[11][12][1]

Conversely, however, only Pareto distributions with exponent correspond to a lifetime

distribution that satisfies Lindy's Law, since the Lindy proportion is required to be positive and finite (in
particular, the lifetime is assumed to have a finite expectation value).[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 , which corresponds to Pareto distributions for the lifetime with the full range of
possible Pareto exponents .[1] Eliazar also demonstrated a relation to Zipf’s Law, and to
socioeconomic inequality, arguing that "Lindy’s Law, Pareto’s Law and Zipf’s Law are in effect
synonymous laws."[1]

See also
Doomsday argument
Memorylessness
Ergodic theory
Paul Skallas, popularly known as LindyMan
Planning fallacy
Preferential attachment
Survivorship curve
Survivorship bias
Weibull distribution
Copernican principle

References
1. Eliazar, Iddo (November 2017). "Lindy's Law". Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its
Applications. 486: 797–805. Bibcode:2017PhyA..486..797E (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/a
bs/2017PhyA..486..797E). doi:10.1016/j.physa.2017.05.077 (https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ph
 ysa.2017.05.077). S2CID 125349686 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:12534968
6).
2. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (https://archive.or
g/details/isbn_9781400067824). Random House. p. 514 (https://archive.org/details/isbn_97
81400067824/page/514). ISBN 9781400067824.
3. Marcus, Ezra (June 17, 2021). "The Lindy Way of Living" (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/
17/style/lindy.html). New York Times. New York City. Retrieved April 6, 2023. "A technology
lawyer named Paul Skallas argues we should be gleaning more wisdom from antiquity."
4. Goldman, Albert (June 13, 1964). "Lindy's Law" (https://web.archive.org/web/202106190157
33/https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1964-goldman.pdf) (PDF). The New Republic.
pp. 34–35. Archived from the original (https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/probability/1964-goldm
an.pdf) (PDF) on June 19, 2021. Retrieved April 6, 2023.
5. Mandelbrot, Benoit B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature (https://archive.org/details/frac
talgeometryo00beno/page/342/mode/2up). W. H. Freeman and Company. p. 342. ISBN 978-
0-7167-1186-5.
6. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (http
s://archive.org/details/blackswanimpacto00tale). Random House. p. 159 (https://archive.org/
details/blackswanimpacto00tale/page/159). ISBN 9781588365835. "Like many biological
variables, life expectancy."
7. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. "Lindy as a Distance from an Absorbing Barrier (Chapter from
SILENT RISK)" (https://www.academia.edu/44944654).
8. Chatfield, Tom (24 June 2019). "The simple rule that can help you predict the future" (https://
www.bbc.com/future/article/20190624-how-to-think-about-the-far-future). BBC. Retrieved
21 May 2020.
9. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (https://archive.or
g/details/isbn_9781400067824). Random House. p. 318 (https://archive.org/details/isbn_97
81400067824/page/318). ISBN 9780679645276. "another forty years."
10. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012-11-27). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (https://bo
oks.google.com/books?id=5fqbz_qGi0AC&q=suggested%20the%20boundary%20perishabl
e%2Fnonperishable%20antifragility&pg=PT572). ISBN 9780679645276.
11. Cook, John (December 17, 2012). "The Lindy effect" (http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/1
2/17/the-lindy-effect/). John D. Cook. Retrieved May 29, 2017.
12. Cook, John (December 19, 2012). "Beethoven, Beatles, and Beyoncé: more on the Lindy
effect" (http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/12/19/more-on-the-lindy-effect/). John D. Cook.
Retrieved May 29, 2017.

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