Lindy effect
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The JC’S favourite Big Ideas™
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“Traditional systems, like wood-plank keeled boats, have an advantage over innovative systems, like the then-novel plywood trimarans, in that the whole process of maintaining traditional things is well-explored and widely understood: old systems break in familiar ways; new systems break in unexpected ways.”
The Lindy effect proposes that the life expectancy of an idea, is proportional to its current age. The longer an idea has survived — the more stress and attack it has survived — the longer it is likely to continue to last. If exposure to shocks and stresses is essentially randomised, the longer an idea has been out there in the world, vulnerable to the sorts of things that could kill it, and it has not been killed off by them then the less likely those things become — or the more likely the thing is to be antifragile to the sorts of shocks that do occur. Ideas might — and, actually, almost always do — mutate to reflect their maximal utility in a given environment.
Ideas also can exist on different levels of abstraction: a sound idea might be articulated in a fashionable way, and quickly become unfashionable, while at a deeper layer the idea is still sound. One can render a twelve bar turnaround in a modish new romantic way which goes out of fashion, while the basic song remains sound. This idea propels Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox.