Thoughts of The Week #49

“Thoughts of the week” is a review of the most interesting thoughts I encountered on Twitter and on other mediums during the last week.

1/5: Inverse Lindy

“If going vegan really gave you better athletic and sexual performance, they would have figured that out long ago. In fact, no one would have to figure it out. Natural selection would do the job for them. Maybe this is an example of Inverse Lindy.” – PD Mangan

The Lindy Principle – well explained in Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile – states that the older an idea, the longer its life expectancy.

The Inverse Lindy Principles states that the older a problem, all other things equal, the longer it will go unsolved.

Three limitations:

• The “all other things equal” refers to the absence of relevant technological innovation. It’s possible that a problem which has been unsolved for ages suddenly gets solved tomorrow, if a new technology has been discovered. On the other side, it’s very likely it gets solved tomorrow by people tinkering with the same old building blocks.
• The “all other things equal” refers to a constant relevance of the problem. A problem getting solved tomorrow because it just became relevant to the larger population yesterday should not be surprising.
• The Inverse Lindy heuristic does not state that you shouldn’t work on old problems, but that you should either work on old problems with new tools or that you should focus on solving new problems with new and old tools alike.

2/5: Principles

“If you don’t believe in free speech for people who you disagree with, and even hate for what they stand for, then you don’t believe in free speech.” – Ricky Gervais

If it’s not general, it’s not a principle.

The solidity of a principle can be estimated applying the Lindy Principle (described above) over time and space.

Over time: has the principle been solid in other times?

Over space: has the principle been solid when apply to other instances, to other groups, to other cultures, in other countries?

3/5: Secrets

“The only secret is that there is no secret.” – Lionel Shriver

Once all the shortcuts have been tried out, you are ready for success.

4/5: Tools

“The best […] tutorial in the universe would barely increase the number of […] programmers. A library that accessibly solves a major pain […] can create 10,000 jobs.” – John A. De Goes

Tools and demands create more jobs than education.

5/5: Teams

“The strongest teams have a lot of diversity of thought but do not have much diversity of values or goals.” – Sam Altman

Paul Portesi correctly pointed out that teams are not about only about the people but more importantly about how those people interact with each other.

The more complex an entity, the more important the interactions of its components. 

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(Here is my general disclaimer.)

Quotes are edited for punctuation and grammar. Eventual formatting is mine. Also text outside of italicized quotation marks is mine. The inclusion of quotes does not imply my endorsement; merely, that they gave me food for thought. I did not optimize this review for clarity, but for its ability to spark thoughts in the reader.