I was reading a weekly newsletter from Mark Sisson and came across "The Lindy Effect". The gist of this idea is that the longer something has been around, the longer it will tend to stay around. For example a book that has been in print for 40 years is more likely to be around in 40 years than a book that comes out today.
This nicely explains something we were discussing recently at dinner - why do we still listen to Mozart and Beethoven but not Salieri? We then dug in a little; everyone knows a bunch of tunes by the Beatles. And yet very few can remember many songs from the year they graduated or moreover from last year.
Of course this does not always hold and why this is a predictor. At some point "Penny Lane" was the current song and a reasonable prediction would be that 54 years later no one would know about it. But we do. And there might be a movie we watch in 2021 that people will watch 54 years from now (although given the current crop of DC and Marvel movies, unlikely :-). It's also the case that this does not work for living beings (yet).
What is most interesting about this then is that a rational person, upon seeing something new under the sun, would bet that it fails the test of time. It doesn't matter what it is, but it will fail. But upon reaching 1, 10, 100 years then the odds get better that the idea/process/scheme/company/etc keeps going another X years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
This nicely explains something we were discussing recently at dinner - why do we still listen to Mozart and Beethoven but not Salieri? We then dug in a little; everyone knows a bunch of tunes by the Beatles. And yet very few can remember many songs from the year they graduated or moreover from last year.
Of course this does not always hold and why this is a predictor. At some point "Penny Lane" was the current song and a reasonable prediction would be that 54 years later no one would know about it. But we do. And there might be a movie we watch in 2021 that people will watch 54 years from now (although given the current crop of DC and Marvel movies, unlikely :-). It's also the case that this does not work for living beings (yet).
What is most interesting about this then is that a rational person, upon seeing something new under the sun, would bet that it fails the test of time. It doesn't matter what it is, but it will fail. But upon reaching 1, 10, 100 years then the odds get better that the idea/process/scheme/company/etc keeps going another X years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect