After this post let nobody say Traditionalism is anti-science for Traditionalism and science are one and the same.

The Lindy Effect is a concept that refers to the phenomenon whereby the longer something has been around, the longer it is expected to continue to be around. It is named after the Lindy's Delicatessen in New York City. Where comedians met to discuss show business trends, according to legend, the life expectancy of a Broadway show was said to be correlated with its length of run: a show that had been running for a long time was expected to continue to run for a long time, whereas a show that had just opened was more likely to close soon.

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The Lindy Effect has been discussed by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Flaneur Nassim Taleb. Mandelbrot, who was one of the pioneers of fractal geometry, used the Lindy Effect to explain the durability of certain patterns and structures in nature. Taleb restricted Mandelbrot’s view of Lindy to those things that are non-perishable, he argues that his Lindy Effect is a fundamental principle that underlies many aspects of life, including technology, fashion, and ideas, and that it is the principle that underlies the scientific method.

La Wik States:

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."

In Taleb’s elucidation, the Lindy Effect is a consequence of the fact that certain things are more robust and durable than others. Taleb argues that the Lindy Effect is similar to the scientific method in that both are based on the idea of via negativa elimination. Taleb points out the congruence between Popper’s conception of truth i.e. we say that something is true if it is “not false”, and thus we know via negativa — which he identifies as really just one case of the general Lindy Effect that the longer something has survived the more likely it will continue to do so.

Here’s an excerpt from Taleb’s own Medium Post:

We said earlier that without skin in game, the mechanism of survival is severely disrupted. This also applies to ideas.

Karl Popper’s idea of falsification is entirely Lindy-compatible; it actually requires the operation of the Lindy Effect, although Popper didn’t have any apparent knowledge of the dynamics, nor did he look at the risk dimension of things. The reason science works, in spite of buls**t vending people who talk about “scientific method”, isn’t because there is a proper scientific method derived by some nerds in isolation, or some “standard” that passes a test similar to an eye exam; rather because scientific ideas are Lindy-prone, that is not exposed to artificial propping up and subjected to their own fragility. Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know that the idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore vulnerable to the falsification of time (and not that of naive falsificationism, that is by some government printed black-and-white guideline). The more an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy. For if you read Feyerabend’s account of the history of scientific discoveries, you can clearly see that anything goes in the process –but not with the test of time.

Note that I am here modifying Popper’s idea; we can replace “true” (rather, not false) with “useful”, even “not harmful”, even “protective to its users”. So I will diverge from Popper in the following. For things to survive, they necessarily need to fare well in the risk dimension, that is be good at not dying, surviving, that type of thing. By the Lindy Effect, if an idea has skin in the game, it is not in the truth game, but in the harm game. An idea survives if it is a good risk manager, that is, not only doesn’t harm its holders, but favors their survival –this also affects superstitions that have crossed centuries because they led to some protective actions. More technically, it needs to be convex and reduce fragility somewhere.

— Nassim Incerto Post on the Lindy Effect

Mathematical Formalisation

It should not then in the least surprise us, that here we find nature’s recurrent theme, one of the central distributions that describes the Lindy Effect, is the obsession of Taleb and Mandelbrot, the Pareto Distribution. The Lindy Effect obtains for a distribution which has a decreasing hazard function, Pareto Distributions are a great example of this since this distribution has the property that the conditional expectation of T-t given that T>t is some multiple p of t, where t is how long the imperishable object has existed so far, and where p is a positive constant.

From this conditional expectation therefore we can see that the longer something has lived the longer it is expected to continue to live, if we also look below at the hazard function we see that, it is a positive constant times 1/t, and of course because T>=0 it is monotonic decreasing on the whole domain i.e. the hazard of dying goes down as you progress further into the future.

Wikipedia is very good, but I set epsilon = 1 + 1/p and jiggled stuff around and did get back to p * t for everyone’s peace of mind. There is an excellent medium post by *audible gasp of amazement* a graduate student in psychology, I tip my fedora, but in all seriousness I strongly recommend this post by Eren Asena, very clearly articulated and lots of resources, even if you just read points 1 and 2, but I definitely recommend the whole thing and Taleb’s own video below.

Biggest Bum Crack Plumbers

Let us give a literary explanation for what is going on here.

You see in this world of ours things change and those things that have existed longest tend to reflect an underlying truth about reality, photosynthesis has existed for hundreds of millions of years and will likely to continue to exist for hundreds of millions of years as it reflects the underlying reality which is that the most easily accessible abundant energy source is the light emitted by the sun, the longer something has been the case the more we should expect it to remain so in the future.

The current main substrategy for utilising this energy is the following: vegetation that have chloroplasts and chlorophyll have survived and outcompeted other organisms and remained dominant, the longer they have remained dominant the more likely it becomes that an alternative better strategy does not exist, or at the least that this strategy is extremely difficult to find either from where we are right now or in general in the space of all possible solutions, therefore we should expect chloroplasts to continue to exist.

One can think of it in a rough approximation like this; Chloroplasts and Chlorophyll are a theory about the best way to harvest solar energy. Every day this theory gets tested by the processes of evolution, the vicissitudes of life, the wicked and frivolous designs of nature and every day the strategy continues to be successful validating the theory.

Now one cannot say that the theory of the chloroplasts is rational, they have no description for why they are the best, but neither does a plumber, you shouldn't pay the plumber with the best sales pitch but the most experience because he's survived longer, my crude Australian version of Taleb’s butcher surgeon argument is that you should employ the plumber who has the biggest bum crack showing because he must do a real good job if people are willing to hire him despite his fucken gnarly attire.

Abolishing Social Science

Taleb continues:

If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent, unless it is also what has been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a nerd-psychologist? This may seem aggressive, but it flows directly from the Lindy Effect, partly from my own assessment of the statistical significance of the results, which is subjected to a Fooled by Randomness effect (Note: see my Meta-distribution of p-values). Consider that a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty nine replicated. Of these thirty nine, I believe than less than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine, neuroscience; on those later.

(I will discuss the misunderstanding of probability and tail risks in Chapter x –or why the warnings of your grandmother or interdicts aren’t “irrational” ; how most of the “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability.)

While our knowledge of physics has not been available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that hold in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (& late Hellenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, M. Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucault, Vaugenargues, La Bruyere, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

— N. N. Taleb Incerto Post on the Lindy Effect

The Power of the Irrational

The further we venture out from world, life and man created by rational God, toward a materialist, naturalist or evolutionary conception the more we are forced to admit that almost everything truly brilliant in the world is the result of irrational processes and so humans too are the result of irrational processes. Thus human minds are not minds created in the image of the great mind of the Most High God, and humans are not endowed with reason as a reflection of that supreme reason to be found in the mind of the Lord of Hosts, no we say reason has come from irrational processes. Neural Networks have further exposed how intelligence and reason are in conflict. One learns from exposure, from experience not from rational deduction or from instruction.

This has been demonstrated fairly conclusively in so many areas now it is impossible to dispute. StockFish vs AlphaZero, i.e. Rational Chess vs Irrational Chess is just one example. You know what is worse though, this really is how you learn as well, you experience things and then you sleep and during your REM sleep your brain fires chaotically adding randomness onto the experience to help generalise it. One of the reasons children are better at learning new things is because they have more of this chaotic firing going on all the time.

All complex systems show this kind of a behaviour, it is trivial. It is true for evolution, though people often oversimplify this too, thinking solely in terms of DNA, it is not only about DNA, it is the whole organism which has a morphology and body. Indeed anyone who has taken a high school biology course knows that we have a tradition of bodies which are slowly built up becoming more morphologically complex at each stage (p.s. yes I know there are problems with evolution not the point of this post) and indeed preceding that we have the same thing with cells.

It is plain to see in the economy also, new companies innovate it is true and sometimes as with smart phones the innovation is large but the smart phone still comes from the mobile phone which comes from the home phone, which comes from the phone with the spinney dial on it, haha, and before that the telegram and so on. Also new companies do not reinvent the wheel of their structure, all good functioning companies are Monarchies run by a CEO. How long has diverse democracy been around, 50 years? So how’s that going? Anyway, sorry I am getting distracted.

Traditional wisdom trumps science because it has existed for longer, have we not been hearing everyday for the last few years that science has vindicated this or that traditional practice, fasting, prayer, meditation, etc. Have we not also heard the vindication of prejudice, of heuristics and many more irrational decision making processes?

Progressivism is dangerous because it outright attacks those things which are most true, demanding reasons for those things which are unreasonably true and most things are unreasonably true! Let us take as an example a healthy field of science, say Physics, old theories fit inside new theories like Babushka (literally “grandmother”) dolls, so that classical physics has not been overthrown but has been saved from things like the ultraviolet catastrophe, the goal of the new theory was to glorify the old, the old theory is fulfilled in the new.

When a field builds up no tradition we know that it is devoid of truth, for nothing it produces withstands the test of time and circumstance, you shall know your theory as you know men by its fruits. Therefore fields that are changing from one mutually exclusive theory to the next have almost certainly not produced much of value. Flip flopping is not the most common thing we see today however, what we find is that in most fields a certain group, hold an iron grip through a sheepish slave morality. They keep being able to generate consensus by abusing statistical tools they do not understand, eventually too these fake types of consensus will collapse because reality always catches up to you.

Thus reason has its proper place when it serves tradition, not when it sets out to undermine every aspect of it, when it does so reason becomes an aberration, and its use maladaptive. So in sincerity we ask who is more anti-science the bible belt Christian who believes in Adam and Eve or the progressive who denies biological sex?

If a theory of human sex that has existed in a substantial way for at most 10 years wants to overthrow biological sex well then we can say with near certainty and I really mean that like 0.99999999999999999999999 it is a pathology and we should look for other causes, hey maybe it has something to do with this 50 to 70% drop in Testosterone levels we keep hearing about? Sorry I forgot its Transphobic to talk about real problems, lmao.

Damn Martin Luther.. Argh!

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