The Lindy Effect: Finding Signal In Noise

The world is full of noise. Pulling out the signal - the meaningful content - that you can use to make better decisions is increasingly difficult in a world bursting with digital media.

It’s actually startling how much information you consume. I recently read that someone who lived in the 16th century and was well educated would consume - in their entire life- the amount of information you’d find in an edition of the New York Times from the 1970s. Crazy, right?

Fortunately, there’s a pretty simple way to filter the knowledge worth knowing from the rest of the noise. It’s called the Lindy Effect.

What’s the lindy effect?

The Lindy Effect is the idea that the older something is, the longer it’s likely to be around in the future.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, defines it for non-perishable items (things like information, intellectual production, etc.) as so:

“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!”

Take Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth, for example. He wrote it in 1606, so it’s been around for about 400 years. According to the Lindy Effect, we can expect it to be around another 400 years.

BUT, if it survives in the zeitgeist another 100 years, we can expect it to be around for another 500 years. The longer it survives, the longer it’s likely to be around in the future.

How To Use The Lindy Effect To Filter For Signal.

The Lindy Effect helps us filter what’s robust - what matters over long periods of time - from what doesn’t matter. You want to learn robust ideas. You want the knowledge that will still be relevant and applicable 10, 20, and 50 years from now.

Time is a natural filter for meaning. If something has been around a long time, it means it’s still important in some way. It’s useful. And those are the kinds of things worth knowing.

In that way, you can use the Lindy Effect to influence the kind of content you consume.

Avoid The Daily News. Read Lindy Books And Publications Instead.

I don’t watch the daily news. If an event is important and newsworthy, it will find its way to me without me having to “tune in.”

The 24-hour news cycle can be a poison to your well-being. It is designed to create noise that ignites your emotions. Daily, it’s impossible to filter the signal from the noise. It’s impossible to know what’s important and what’s not.

So, I let time be a natural filter for meaning. I read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about once a week on the weekends.

By then, the day-to-day noise has faded somewhat, allowing content that will be relevant for more than one day rise to the surface. Even better are monthly publications.

When it comes to books - read the classics. These are the ideas of the best thinkers over thousands of years. Here’s Naval Ravikant talking about this from The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant:

“Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom… Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.”

Read the books that have been around for 20+ years and are still referenced today. That way, you can be pretty sure that what you’re learning will still be relevant decades from now.

When You’re Finished Reading The Classics, Read Them Again.

The best content - the stuff that really matters - is worth reading over again because you’ll always find something new. So, when you’ve finished with the classics, pick up the best ones again.

Taleb has a great quote about this: “A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.”

Naval Ravikant re-reads lindy books more than he reads new ones:

“These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, ‘I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.’ I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.”

I dedicated an entire article to the power of reading for wealth creation. You can check it out here.

Happy (Lindy) reading!

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SOURCES

Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile (Incerto). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.