The Lindy Effect
I like to use the Lindy effect as an everyday heuristic, quite often for choosing what books to read. That is: if a book has been highly relevant, say, for the past 20 years, it may have considerable relevance 20 years from today as well. Conclusion: I will think about buying that physical book for my home library, so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of &quot;classics&quot; from many eras by the time they reach young adulthood.<p>As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. Usually, one is not in a hurry with reading a book; also, new books can be really well marketed these days, which always makes me cautious. It seems to make more sense to read a book 5-10 years after it was first released.<p>The Lindy effect does seem to hold true when I think about e.g. SICP, K&amp;R&#x27;s C book -- or Kernighan et al&#x27;s 1988 AWK book for which the authors release a second edition in October this year! [1]<p>Not to mention classic books in fiction or philosophy. Or cultural memes and ideas -- as a rough heuristic, the Lindy effect does often seem to hold true with these as well. It is a fun and extremely useful thinking tool for longer-term everyday prognostics.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awk.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.awk.dev&#x2F;</a>