Lindy effects, perpetual formation, and small-world networks
Athenarium Newsletter April 2022
Dear readers,
This is your April 2022 newsletter from Athenarium — your humble place for ideas in economics, investing, and systems-thinking. In this month’s update, you’ll find articles on:
Investing and markets
Impermanence, shelf-life, and scale-economies-shared — Lessons from Howard Marks, Nick Sleep, and others
The mercurial Mr Market — Ben Graham on price prediction, market madness, and elementary prudence
Intellectual idiots, the Lindy effect, and ensemble probabilities — Musings from Nassim Taleb
Economics, systems and complexity
Complexity and the Economy — W. Brian Arthur on perpetual formation and combinatorial evolution
Growth, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities — Geoffrey West on scale economies and increasing returns
Small-world and scale-free networks — Melanie Mitchell on network thinking and complexity
The Architecture of Complexity — Herbert Simon on watchmaking, hierarchies, and decomposable systems
Around the web
Crypto Mania, Financial Contagion, and the “Goldilocks Zone” — We shared some crypto-thoughts on the Enterprising Investor, CFA Institute.
As always, thank you for readership.
Warm regards,
Athenarium team
Ideas on Anti-Lindy or Para-Lindy conceptualization: There are no clear indicator if something is currently Lindy, that they will continuously survive. Here are two examples: Metals and Fiat are always in a game of the Ying and Yang, or "two fishes trying to eat each other", where one is stationary and the other dynamic. However, we already know that Bitcoin as the Lindy currency will eat up "degenerators", and the same goes for USD and some developing nations.
There needs to be a law that govern how elder gods (ancient ideas) can "eat" axial gods (classical ideas), since there are uncertainty on why some contemporary gods (modernist ideas) gets eliminated by axial gods, whilst others don't... maybe they are elder gods in disguise, and "big f**ks small" (T. Shelby LOL)?
Ideas of Emergence: Ergodic Theory might mean that complexity absorbs entropy of the world, and that the world's entropy should be constant. Information and complexity is equivalent to creativity and meaning, but it might be separate from entropy, or lack of positive reinforcement https://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2010/10/dreaming-boltzmann-brains.html https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762 https://medium.com/swlh/what-is-entropy-an-exploration-of-life-time-and-immortality-85488e1eea36 http://www.kierandkelly.com/what-is-creativity/deep-creativity/ http://www.kierandkelly.com/chaos-and-complexity/