The Lindy Way of Living | Hacker News Reader

The Lindy Way of Living

nytimes.com

49 pointsAmbolia38 comments

Skallas is amusing on twitter but his newsletter is just gobs of copy-pasted plagiarism passed off as his own writing, so IMO he's not really worth promoting. Alexander Pshenichnyy has documented several, though I can't find all the threads.

https://twitter.com/maintcraft/status/1405850286334386176

https://twitter.com/maintcraft/status/1353636211676622848

I guess being a fraud is in some sense lindy, but I've flagged the post because of it.

This is interesting but it's not the kind of thing that a post should be flagged for.

You flagged it as what? I need to know so to understand if flagging a post is Lindy or not! :)

I'm concerned about the fast cultural changes of society. From everything I read, there's been a lot of changes around how and what we teach our children in public schools in the US. I'm worried about the long term impacts on the next generation, primarily because the change was so sudden and abrupt [0]. None of these ideas and methods have stood the test of time and proven themselves effective in producing well adjusted functioning members of society.

I think we should have more reverence towards culture and tradition, especially relating to raising our children. I'm surprised how many people are so convicted of their newly found belief system that they're willing to experiment with their own children

[0] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/i-refuse-to-stand-by-while-...

This "newly found belief system" you mention is over 60 years old...

It may help clarify the conversation if you both specified precisely which belief system you have in mind. I suspect there are perhaps small, but crucial differences between them.

From the article I cited:

> Students are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions. The morally compromised status of “oppressor” is assigned to one group of students based on their immutable characteristics. In the meantime, dependency, resentment and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered “oppressed.”

I guess it's this oppressor/oppressed ideology that neatly buckets people into bins based on immutable characteristics. It ignores individualism and personal responsibility. I don't know what the outcome will be of telling kids that they are more or less living in a system corrupt to the core and they are more or less a victim of circumstances of birth. But I'd prefer not to run this experiment with my children.

Also, reintroduction of segregation:

> Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.)

Your definition of the belief system is not accurate and designed to hit on a number of wedge issues about collectivism vs individualism.

>I don't know what the outcome will be of telling kids that they are more or less living in a system corrupt to the core and they are more or less a victim of circumstances of birth.

There is an irony here as existing education lies to children and teaches them that the world is a fair and just place any anybody can succeed given enough effort.

It's only through being able to collate data on a global scale and efficiently share the experiences of people that we've been able to witness how untrue the existing individualist meritocracy myth is.

60 years is a minuscule amount of time when it comes to the history of education

Not really, the history of education is surprisingly short. So 60 years is ~1.5% of the total for formal education, and a much larger larger chunk of anything we have meaningful records for.

Indeed, I suspect that experimenting with new ways of teaching children, and believing that doing so is ruining children's minds, are both as old as humanity itself.

I’m a believer in technological determinism (from wiki), a “...theory that assumes that a society's technology determines the development of its social structure and cultural values.”

I also believe that the rate of technological change is accelerating (technology begets more technology).

When you take those two things together you’re left with a rapidly changing world that is just going to keep getting disrupted by new paradigm shifts at a faster and faster pace.

This is both why we need conservatism, traditionalism, and cultural limits on uncontrolled growth and change... and simultaneously why we need flexibility, agility, and openness to change.

This isn’t an either or situation, either stick our heads in the stand and try to stop time, or throw caution to the wind and run headfirst into the unknown.

Balance, we need balance.

It also depends on the domain.

Try out a brand new stack on a weekend project? Yes please.

Give my child a brand new drug that supposedly helps them concentrate on school their work? Hard pass.

> fast cultural changes of society

Don't panic. Cultural upheaval will eventually subside once technological progress stagnates.

More seriously, society goes insane every time technological progress upsets the status quo. I doubt things will settle down anytime soon.

re Bari Weiss

Every generation thinks they invented sex. Youth rebel, elders scold. It's the (pundit) cycle of life.

My mom was a teacher, mostly learning disabled kids. Her passion. Champion of her kids. Think Tiger Mom as teacher.

Toured our state helping other LD teachers. She fought the district, the state, the union, the building administration, the curriculum, etc. Really pissed off a lot of people. Her students and their parents loved her.

Teachers pay a high price. Blood, sweat, and tears.

It's now Weiss' turn at the wood shed.

I find these ideas interesting, but the "lindy walk" meme hints at a kind of personality cult. Like that's literally just a walk. If you go outside, walk, without any clear goal in mind, that's called going for a walk. I'm not sure the personality cult is even the reason it creeps me out. Maybe it's just that some people can't do stuff unless there's some kind of lifestyle brand associated with it. And by the way, taking your phone on walks so that you can send pictures to lindy man isn't lindy either. One of the most important aspects of it to me is to get away from technology.

It's just the euphemism treadmill. New words and phrases cycle all the time to describe the same concept.

I wonder how well the Lindy effect can be applied to picking a technology stack.

Clearly, there's some benefits to choosing something new and hot- it wouldn't be hot if it weren't doing something useful that it's predecessors did not. But there's also an advantage to picking something that's been around a while.

I suppose in my mind one can say "Presume I am willing to rewrite this in K years- I want to pick a tech stack of things that have all been around at least K years".

If you're whipping up a prototype in a deliver-before-money-runs-out environment, you use what you need to use to deliver something immediately and accept that a rewrite next year after you get funding is fine. Pick new tech if it's fast. If you're in a big company and know that this thing you write is going to have to exist for a decade, well, nobody is going to fire you for building your backend on Java.

It's a new name for a relatively old practice: build your experimental thing on top of the sturdiest foundation you can afford.

My proverb for the same thing is "never forget the best parts of obsolete technology".

I would fire you if you wrote the back end in java

I think that the (engineering and computing) technology version of the concept may be best exemplified by unix and Fortran/C/C++. At least in my field, Numerical Analysis of PDE, we encounter computationally heavy problems daily, and for decades numerical analysts have been coding on unix/linux in those languages. I recently discovered code that my own grandfather used for solving thin shell problems, which are studied by some civil engineers. It was written in Fortran, but he used punched cards (1974).

Reminds me of Choose Boring Technology[1]. I guess the essay might as well be called "Choose Lindy Technology".

[1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

“No breakfast,” he said. “Breakfast was unknown in early history, Rome, Byzantium, ancient Greece, breakfast wasn’t really a thing.”

Oh? In Robert Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey, Book XVI begins

  But there were two men in the mountain hut--
  Odysseus and the swineherd. At first light,
  blowing their fire up, they cooked breakfast ...

Liddell and Scott say that "ariston", the Homeric term, slipped later in the day, ending up about 11 am; on the other hand, they say it was replaced by "akratisma".

Using a massive telecommunications network to tell a global audience what's Lindy? Not Lindy!

As usual, the replies are attacking an oversimplication of the concept of the Lindy effect, and that reaction in part may be because Skallas indulges in oversimplification himself. The condition of something being Lindy is something to be determined after a long time has passed (tried-and-tested, stading the test of time, centuries or even thousands of years), it does not necessarily imply that all technology is inherently bad, but that dropping timeless heuristics that helped humans get by, acquire knowledge, solve problems, etc. is.

May I add, one of the best sources for the Lindy effect is Nassim Taleb's works (the final part of The Black Swan and Antifragile).

I'm not sure if the Lindy Hop is what TFA has in mind, but I've never seen couples so happy as those who do this dancing on a regular basis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmvKrPUo97E

The definition of what is Lindy or not seems arbitrary:

Yoga, which has been practiced for millenia, was not considered Lindy, but nightclubs are somehow deep Lindy.

Author talks about no breakfast because a few ancient cultures in the West did not eat it, but ignored other cultures in the world that have historically favored eating breakfast. Maybe it's true in some European cultures that breakfast was uncommon, but it is not a global preference.

Towards the end of the article, the author mentions that vaccines are lindy. Mr. Skallas probably took the mRNA vaccine, which is definitely not lindy.

Overall a lot of it sounds like post-hoc rationalizing of personal preferences.

Lindy Effect is another formulation of attention economy and power laws. Ditto "long tail".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile#Lindy_effect

I don't know what to do with this kind of wisdom. Sure, it's fun to think about. Like Trivial Pursuit and 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Then what?

Reject modernity. Return to tradition.

non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/0cnrg

While we’re discussing mouthwash can we also discuss flossing? It really does seem like a stupid exercise, and once you do it once, you have to do it everyday forever . I’ve never flossed in my life and consider myself blessed that my parents didn’t force this on me before I could make my own choices.

Also I’ve never had to go to a dentist for anything other than a checkup before flying off to another country, and my diet is the absolute opposite of what anyone would consider healthy so there’s that.

Once you do it once, you have to do it forever?

My hypothesis is that flossing is the act that actually creates the gaps that you need to now keep clean by flossing forever. If you never floss, but just brush well and hard, you don’t have that big of gaps between your teeth. This is just my hypothesis of course, but perhaps it attacks everyone in their belief that they are doing well informed things first thing in the morning, no one wants to even entertain the possibility.

Well, this might be why a) it’s better if we guide behaviour based on large amounts of data rather than anecdotes, and we should b) probably trust experts (within reason).

My contrasting anecdata is that I was brought up with relatively poor dental hygiene standards and candy as a regular treat. Maybe there are other differences between us as well (are some teeth just better, stronger?) but I’ve got teeth with lots of fillings - and based on location, some decay seems obviously directly related to not having regularly flossed.

So, I wish I’d been taught better behaviours including flossing when I was young, and hadn’t had my brain’s reward centres quite so attuned to sugar.

I didn’t recommend not to floss based on just my experience, I merely brought it up as a hypothesis that might be worth considering.

If you want more data to take this point as well: most Indians don’t floss. The dentists here don’t recommend it either but importantly I don’t see more dental hygiene issues here than in other places.

Also I didn’t say I didn’t take care of my teeth, I’m just suggesting we consider maybe brushing your teeth very well might be more than sufficient.

No, let's not discuss flossing. Maybe we could look at the literature and conclude something other than "periodontal health significantly benefits from flossing," but this anecdote is not particularly scientific and could be harmful to health.

Can you please cite said literature? You know peer reviewed studies that show proof flossing is very important?

The only recent study of any meaningful size I’ve found is this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpe.12765 and this can also only show a 17% reduction in periodontitis if you floss a couple times a week. Even when compared within the American population (which I posit has flossed at least once in their lifetime for the most part), there’s vanishingly little benefit in reducing an arguably non life threatening condition and that requires you to annoy yourself every day of your life.

I’ll wait for you to show any studies before I make more judgements.

Importantly my hypothesis is more nuanced and hinges on the fact of “never having flossed”. I haven’t come across a study that looks at this aspect and would love to see what such a study would say.

You can tie floss into a loop. It's way better than strangling your fingers and faster too. Look at the last picture in the first post of this thread: https://igkt.net/sm/index.php?topic=2013.15

You grab and twist a doubled-up line, then pull the small end through the new hole. This takes just a few seconds and now I don't mind flossing daily.

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