Another ramification of the 125% longer/40% confidence Lindy Effect is that it’ll always be reasonable to expect the thing you’re considering to have already ended if you’re using it to establish your priors for forward-looking life expectancy. You could deal with that paradox by shrinking the early bound of what you’ll consider a correct prediction and being more generous on the late bound of when the thing ends.
The Lindy Effect is thus an anti-conservative heuristic. With a generous confidence interval, It’s reasonable to expect, in the absence of other information, that anything could end this year. What Lindy does is provide a maximum value on our super-low-information prior for longevity.
At least a quarter of the world’s population live on farms. That’s been true for the last 12,000 years. The Lindy Effect suggests that state of affairs might end this year, but that we shouldn’t expect it to last more than another 4,000 years or so.
The Lindy Effect is also scope insensitive. It’s clearly more likely that at least 10% of the world’s population live on farms as of next year. But the Lindy heuristic generates the same estimate no matter what the cutoff is, as long as it’s at least the present-day level. I suppose the scope is inside-view information, so perhaps that makes sense if we’re looking for a strictly outside-view prior.
Another ramification of the 125% longer/40% confidence Lindy Effect is that it’ll always be reasonable to expect the thing you’re considering to have already ended if you’re using it to establish your priors for forward-looking life expectancy. You could deal with that paradox by shrinking the early bound of what you’ll consider a correct prediction and being more generous on the late bound of when the thing ends.
The Lindy Effect is thus an anti-conservative heuristic. With a generous confidence interval, It’s reasonable to expect, in the absence of other information, that anything could end this year. What Lindy does is provide a maximum value on our super-low-information prior for longevity.
At least a quarter of the world’s population live on farms. That’s been true for the last 12,000 years. The Lindy Effect suggests that state of affairs might end this year, but that we shouldn’t expect it to last more than another 4,000 years or so.
The Lindy Effect is also scope insensitive. It’s clearly more likely that at least 10% of the world’s population live on farms as of next year. But the Lindy heuristic generates the same estimate no matter what the cutoff is, as long as it’s at least the present-day level. I suppose the scope is inside-view information, so perhaps that makes sense if we’re looking for a strictly outside-view prior.