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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3406 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

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What the hell does it mean to be lindy?

Or a member of TPOT on Twitter? I know they're rat adjacent shitposters with an interest in AI, but I'm sure there's more to it.

The term Lindy comes from Taleb.

Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.

https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf

There are two classes: perishables and non-perishables. For humans, the older you get, the more likely you are to die. For non-perishables, it is the opposite. The older a building gets, the more likely it is to survive. In 200 years, the pyramids will still be standing, the Eiffel tower will probably still be there, and those newly erected apartment blocks almost certainly not. Same goes for books, ideas, countries, laws, and so on. Shakespeare will live on longer than the latest Hugo Award winner.

That's the Lindy effect. The adjective lindy is used to describe anything that's old, that has stood the test of time, and thus implied that is it true or useful or valuable. Or at the very least, a certain lens worth applying.

Video games? “Not Lindy.”

Nightclubs? “Lindy. In fact, deep Lindy.”

Sleek midcentury modernism? “Anytime you get away from fractal patterns and ornate details, it’s not Lindy.”

How about sex toys? “Lindy,” he said, adding, by way of explanation, “ancient Egypt.”

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal? “Some rich guy going around and doing criminal behavior and abusing people? It’s pretty Lindy!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/style/lindy.html

Thanks, that clears it up!

My understanding is that TPOT is just a group with similiar cultural sensibilities and references, senses of humor, political tolerations (if not political views), interests, etc, that agglomerated together on Twitter. One point of commonality that was found to be extremely widespread among them (though I don't think was explicitly foundational) was that, at some point in the past, most of them had dipped into the rat-o-sphere to widely varying degrees, to the point that "postrat" is an effectively equivalent term.

I see, they make it seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

TPOT just means "this part of twitter". Recently there was the second annual Vibe Camp, a tpot meetup, but I don't think there is much more to it than that. I think a lot of it is excitement when people find others that 'get' them.

I think it is a pretty big deal, certainly as far as half-pseudonymous internet communities go. Especially with its strong, early connections with AI development, as AI explodes in importance.

TPOT is the cool kids table at the cultural center of tech. Remember how much of the world was remade around the sensibilities of the kind of people who were early to computers and the internet.

According to urbandictionary Nassim Taleb coined it to mean a form of longevity in which things that have been around for a long time seem to be more likely to be around for a long time yet to come.

I'm not sure if that's just a reframing of the conservative position but thanks for clarifying!

Conservatives wouldn't have much of a need to fight to preserve thier traditions if this were the case.

To strawman:

Lindy - has been around for a long time therefore will be around for much longer.

Conservative - has been around for a long time therefore should be around for much longer.

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