The Lindy effect (or Lindy's Law).
The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time.
Example: you have two books to choose from (assuming both seem equally interesting), you don't much information about them except how long they've been in print. the first one has came out this year, and the other one has been in print for 40 years.
Using Lindy you can expect the first book's sales to drop either this year or the next one, and you can expect the latter to stay in print for about 40 more years. in other words, the older book is likely to be more relevant, and so that's the one you'll choose.
I suggest Nassim Taleb's 'Antifragile' if you wish to read more about it.
Thanks for writing this post! i always felt that many of Taleb's concepts/ideas were missing from LessWrong (which is not the same as saying that they're missing from the community, it's hard to know that, and i assume many are familiar). I thought about writing a few canonical posts myself about some of his ideas, but wasn't sure how to go about it.
More specifically i thought about making a Risk tag and noticed there were very few posts talking about risk (on the meta level) instead of a specific risk (like AI), and that was surprising to me.
At level 3, what matters is that your side is winning, at level 4, what matters is that you're on the winning side.
What a fantastic distinction, thank you.
Out of these I think Dissolving the Question is probably the right name for the tag. Dissolving the Cognitive Algorithm is in interesting alternate name for the technique, but since it isn't known it's not very good for the tag name. How an algorithm feels from the inside doesn't feel like a tag name, and wouldn't be intuitive to put on posts that aim to dissolve questions.
Though Dissolving the Question also feels awkward for a tag name. Perhaps 'Dissolving Questions", of if anyone has better ideas?
I made an Epistemic Spot Check tag. i wasn't sure if i should create it at first, because although the content fits posts from anyone (i myself am thinking of making a post in that style), it currently only has content from Elizabeth. i decided to go ahead and create it anyway, even if just to experiment. also only after creating i remembered that there's an Epistemic Review tag, oh well.
Maybe the "practical" side of empiricism.
Could be cool to add download links to some sequences. for example Zvi's Immoral Mazes sequence is one i'm more likely to read on an e-reader, and i think it's pretty much book-length.
Just a small note, i think it would be nicer if the tag editing popup was higher, so when you hover over a tag you're able to see the description popup for it.
PSA: You can now add and edit tags for a post from the drop down menu to the right of it (in places like the front page, tag pages, user profiles, etc.).
This makes it much easier to go through a big list of posts and adding relevant tags. you can go to one of the lists that are linked in the progress bar in the main page and start ploughing through the posts.
Thanks for the LW team for enabling this feature :)
I made a Hard Problem of Consciousness tag. it seems distinct enough from the Consciousness tag, which already has 46 posts.