Tag Archives: Lindy effect

THE ETHICS OF DEBATING

Leave a reply

THE ETHICS OF DEBATING.
You can attack what a person *said* or what the person *meant*. The former is more sensational. The mark of a charlatan (say the journalist Sam Harris) is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on *some* of his/her specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than attacking his position (“look at what he means”), the latter of which requires a broader knowledge of the proposed idea. The same applies to the interpretation of religious texts. Given that it is impossible for anyone to write a perfectly rationally argued document without a segment that, out of context, can appear to be totally absurd and lend itself to sensationalization, politicians and charlatans hunt for these segments. So do some, but not all journalists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Twitter mobs indeed go by these sensationalized statements: extracting the most likely to appear absurd and violating the principle of charity. With the growth of the internet get ready for more.
And you can easily tell if someone is a charlatan at their absence of use of the principle of charity.
I just subjected the principle of charity to the Lindy test: it is only about 60 years old. Why? Does it meant that it is bogus? Well, we did not need it before before discussions were never about slogans and snapshots but synthesis of a given position. Read Aquinas, 8 centuries ago, and you always see sections with QUESTIO->PRAETERIA, OBJECTIONES, SED CONTRA, etc. describing with a legalistic precision the positions being attacked and looking for a flaw in it and a compromise. That was the practice.

UPDATE- Bradford Tuckfield wrote: ” I think this principle is much older than 60 years. Consider in the book of Isaiah, chapter 29, verse 21: he denounces the wicked who “make a man an offender for a word,” implying that people were focusing on specific words rather than positions, and that this is a bad practice.”
So it seems that the Lindy effect wins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
 
Principle of charity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker’s statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.[1] In its narrowest sense, the goal of this methodological principle is to avoid attributing irr…
en.wikipedia.org

Source: Facebook

A conjecture. Any “discovery” in the “soft” sciences…

Leave a reply

A conjecture. Any “discovery” in the “soft” sciences related to human nature that is not wrong should be found in the ancients, and, if not there, it would be wrong.
—-
For ease of access these get recycled in Montaigne (who was a popularizer of people who wrote 1500 y earlier), better, the vastly more erudite Erasmus, plus the corpus Paroemiographorum of Greek proverbs, a compilation of Arabic proverbs, etc.
This is Lindy at work. I announced it to John Gray who immediately wondered if that covered such a thing as “cognitive dissonance”, an idea that seems eminently modern. Well, it is found it in Montaigne “Effect renard”, referring to Aesop (sour grapes, the grapes you can’t reach are declaed ex post to be not good.) We’ve known about it for at least 2600 years (and Aeasop was reflecting collective, perhaps more ancient, wisdom).
One exception perhaps concerns things that correspond to modernity, things to which the ancients were not exposed.
—-

via A conjecture. Any “discovery” in the “soft”… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

LINDY FOR THE DETECTION of MODERN BULLSHIT

Leave a reply

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*.

—

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.

—

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

An improvement of the LINDY EFFECT…

Leave a reply

An improvement of the LINDY EFFECT: We can sort of measure of conditional antifragility by looking at what went down and bounced back. Things that survive provide information; but things that bounced back from severe hardship provide even more information under some conditions of homogeneity. You are as good as the worst adversity you encountered in your past.This is useful for persons, companies, etc. Never catch a falling knife: I prefer to buy the stock of a company that went down, then bounced back than an equivalent one that never went down to these low levels adjusting of course for other considerations.More technically, things that came back from level Si are stronger than things that came back from level Sj>Si. So for a family of processes {S} that start at the same point S0 and end at the same point ST, the one with the largest distance from its minimum Smin is the one that is potentially the most antifragile.

via Timeline Photos | Facebook.

Why we will be using email for at least another 50 years — GigaOM Pro

Leave a reply

So, applying Taleb’s reasoning and Benoit Mandelbrot’s version of the Lindy effect, our modern social technologies — most of which haven’t been with us more than five years — can be guaranteed to be with us only an addition five years or so. And those pre- or proto-social technologies — like instant messaging and email — may be with us 50 years or more, even if the social tools don’t fall into disuse.

So, if you are scratching your head five or ten years from now, and wondering why people are still using email to do things that might be better done with newer and shinier tools, just remember this is not about rationality, it’s about something more like gravity, more like deep culture:

If there’s something in the culture – say, a practice or a religion that you don’t understand – yet has been done for a long time – don’t call it “irrational.” And: Don’t expect the practice to discontinue.

via Why we will be using email for at least another 50 years — GigaOM Pro.