Geoff's Miscellany

Schools purporting to offer a classical education are cropping up around the country. Is this recent trend good or bad? To answer this question, I propose that classical education is Lindy-compatible, and therefore minimally not harmful, but likely helpful.

Here is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's description of the Lindy effect:

“Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.“