Comment by cortesoft
12 hours ago
I feel like Lindy's law doesn't work for things whose observation is partly controlled by the thing itself.
For example, take something like a fad or trend; they don't have a hard end date like human lifespan, so it should follow Lindy's law.
However, the likelihood, on average across the population, that you observe a trend is going to be higher at the end of a trend lifecycle than at the beginning. This is baked into the definition - more and more people hear about a trend over time, so the largest quantity of observers will be at the end of the lifecycle, when the popularity reaches its peak.
In other words, if you are a random person, finding out about a trend likely means it is near the end rather than the middle.
Well it only works when there is no information at all apart from the past frequency.
It's the solution to the tank problem. You know that the enemy number their tanks as they're produced. You capture a tank and know its number, N. What's the best guess about how many tanks the enemy has produced so far? As a pure mathematical model with no other details, the best guess is 2N. Of course in reality you have some ideas about how long it takes to make a tank, how many resources the enemy has etc.
Analogously you have information about the way trends develop.
Similarly, if you are a random person being alive, it likely means that the world population is near its peak and extinction is at hand, or at least the start of a permanent decline.
We have at least global warming and impending WW3, so that line of reasoning seems to work.