I can curse on Twitter but never on the page and never never inside my library(ies), simple separation holy/profane. You need separations holy/profane. #Lindy https://
Category: Lindy
Duesseldorf The German Publisher put me in a hotel with a fully functional bathtub on the balcony. If these things don’t make you a traditionalist, I don’t know what will.
Burn old logs Drink old wine Read old books Keep old friends, Alphonso X, #LindyEffect
For your book to be read in 20y, make sure content is 1) important for people today, 2) was also important 20 y ago. #Lindy @CutTheKnotMath
Haha, where does this leave the — long discredited –Oedipus complex? Shoudl focus on animal examples instead. No, nitwit, it means that things that replicate should be Lindy not that Lindy things should replicate.
Three thousand years ago, in the same location, the wrath of Achilleos … Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος The beauty of the Iliad: valorous in battle yet have character flaws.
Thank God Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite. #Lindyeffect
Valuable advice from great people, 2: Mark Kac told Benoit Mandelbrot: “Stop writing papers. You are confusing us more and more. Write a book!” (which was not considered a scientific contribution, in fact counted in reverse). Hence “The Fractal Geometry of Nature”. https://amazon.com/Fractal-Geometry-Nature-Benoit-Mandelbrot
Valuable advice from great people, 1: On the importance of living in a Boring Place, decrease external dimensionality. Descartes could not live in Paris because he had too many interesting friends. He moved to Belgium and Sweden (then very very poor and rural) so he could reduce noise of ideas. And he also did turn down a university position as too distracting. (One can enumerate accounts: Jules Vernes also left Paris for Nantes, partly for family reasons, mainly because it was boring enough… but his argument was “good for a day trip to Paris”)
LINDY FOR THE DETECTION of MODERN BULLSHIT. It is a (sort of) truism that we make the mistake of thinking of the past in terms entire made in the present, making the mistake of propagating backwards such notions as “religion”, “values”, “Gods”, “success”, “happiness”, “ambition”, “meaning of life”, and attribute it to motives of action, when these either didn’t mean much for people in the middle ages and antiquity or had different significance for them. For instance, for Semites, religion meant “law”, didn’t have the spiritual dimension we attribute today; it didn’t care of the notion of “belief” (and Christianity didn’t have a word for it other than “trust”). For pagans, Gods were cultural artifacts… For Romans, freedom meant not being a slave and *having no debt*. — What I am now trying to do, in a systematic way, is the opposite operation, that is, to reexpress the present entirely in terms that an ancient person would have grasped, that is, to propagate the mentality forward, while incorporating modern gains in ethics such as “equality”, social justice, etc. — So using Lindy as a bullshit detection mechanism, I can eliminate modern notions such as “success”, “achievement”, etc., those that do not have a moral dimension.
