LINDY FOR THE DETECTION of MODERN BULLSHIT.

It is a (sort of) truism that we make the mistake of thinking of the past in terms entire made in the present, making the mistake of propagating backwards such notions as “religion”, “values”, “Gods”, “success”, “happiness”, “ambition”, “meaning of life”, and attribute it to motives of action, when these either didn’t mean much for people in the middle ages and antiquity or had different significance for them. For instance, for Semites, religion meant “law”, didn’t have the spiritual dimension we attribute today; it didn’t care of the notion of “belief” (and Christianity didn’t have a word for it other than “trust”). For pagans, Gods were cultural artifacts… For Romans, freedom meant not being a slave and *having no debt*.

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What I am now trying to do, in a systematic way, is the opposite operation, that is, to reexpress the present entirely in terms that an ancient person would have grasped, that is, to propagate the mentality forward, while incorporating modern gains in ethics such as “equality”, social justice, etc.

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So using Lindy as a bullshit detection mechanism, I can eliminate modern notions such as “success”, “achievement”, etc., those that do not have a moral dimension.

via LINDY FOR THE DETECTION of MODERN BULLSHIT. It… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Lindy Effect