| Happy Sunday, everyone. Someone recently welcomed me to "the Lindy table" on Twitter and asked me what I thought about the Lindy Effect. I first heard about the Lindy Effect in Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, where Taleb describes it as such (paraphrasing): the longer something's been around, the longer it will continue to survive. You can apply this to everything and it makes perfect sense. Books are a common example. A book that's been in print for 70 years will still be in print 70 years from now; most of the books that came out this year, even the best sellers, will not. Pains me to say it, but Hemingway will probably outlast Sisson. The best way to cook is still with fire. The best way to eat is still at a table with friends and loved ones and good conversation and lots of laughter. The best way to cut a steak is with a knife that works a lot like the flint knives they were using to strip mammoth flesh from bone. Fashion hasn't changed too much; pants have been around since steppe horsemen and they aren't going anywhere. The best shoes are just like the earliest, flattest ones; the modern abominations with high heels and padded soles are ruining our gait and our health. It's ultimately a good heuristic for evaluating quality, efficacy, robustness, and even worth, especially in the absence of other information. Has something been around for a thousand years? Maybe there's something to it. This obviously doesn't always hold true, and data to the contrary might disprove it, but more often than not the data confirms the Lindy Effect. I like the Lindy Effect, I find it useful, and it reminds me a lot of what we do in the ancestral health community. What we're doing with the Primal Blueprint and the overall ancestral health lens is figuring out which things in the human experience have stood the test of time. Which foods has the human digestive system been dealing with for 20,000 years? Eat more of those. Which foods has the human digestive system only encountered in the last 60 years? Don't eat those. You might call this "Lindy on a much longer timescale." Evolutionary Lindy. Biological Lindy. I feel a kinship with it, actually. Just like I've always done with my Primal approach, Lindy is about drawing on the past to inform the future. To make better choices, choices that are more in line with your humanity and the humanity of those who came before you. You can't divest from the long tradition of being a human. You can't exist above it all, outside everything. No one can. The rules still apply to you. What do you guys think of the Lindy Effect? Do you see a kinship with the Primal approach to health and fitness? It seems like a lot of different modes of thinking are converging these days... Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy. | 