'Lindy' things are ideas, concepts, or technology which have been around for ages and can therefore be expected to be around for ages in the future.
There is some math behind the idea (alas, the math is beyond my ability to explain) which suggests that however long a concept has been in use is the amount of time you can expect it to be in use in the future. (It's an argument about probabilities which I do not understand!)
As people age, every year we get older is a year less ahead of us, but as technologies age, every extra year they are in use suggests another year that they will be in use. So bicycles have been around a few hundred years, so we can expect we'll still be using them in a few hundred years. Books have been around a few thousand years, so we can expect we'll still be using them in a few thousand years. But many novel technologies which have only been around a decade or so will probably disappear in a decade or so (RIP the fax!).
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-07-23 06:48 am (UTC)'Lindy' things are ideas, concepts, or technology which have been around for ages and can therefore be expected to be around for ages in the future.
There is some math behind the idea (alas, the math is beyond my ability to explain) which suggests that however long a concept has been in use is the amount of time you can expect it to be in use in the future. (It's an argument about probabilities which I do not understand!)
As people age, every year we get older is a year less ahead of us, but as technologies age, every extra year they are in use suggests another year that they will be in use. So bicycles have been around a few hundred years, so we can expect we'll still be using them in a few hundred years. Books have been around a few thousand years, so we can expect we'll still be using them in a few thousand years. But many novel technologies which have only been around a decade or so will probably disappear in a decade or so (RIP the fax!).