by wunderlust on 6/5/22, 8:38 PM with 2 comments
by wunderlust on 6/5/22, 8:50 PM
Suppose you’re at a restaurant waiting for your meal to arrive. You don’t know exactly how long it will take, but you have some reasonable bounds (say, more than 10 minutes but less than 30). Suppose you’ve been waiting ~20 minutes. It’s reasonable then to expect that the meal should be arriving soon. Suppose now that it’s been ~25 minutes. Then you expect that it should be arriving very soon. At ~30 minutes, you’d think that it must be on its way out of the kitchen or will be very, very soon. At ~35 minutes you’re convinced it must be there any moment.
As the time continues to increase, you find yourself in a sort of paradox—because you have a frame of reference for how long it takes a meal to arrive to a table, you expect that, as the time elapsed increases, the time remaining should decrease; on the other hand, at some point (some t+n significantly greater than you’d expect to wait), you find it just as reasonable that there’s a problem and that perhaps you should be expecting the remaining time to increase!
You may experience something similar at a red light. After waiting 2 minutes, you think surely the light will change very soon, but after 10 minutes you think perhaps the light will never change.
These are slightly different formulations of the Lindy effect but I think they’re equivalent or at least analogous and you can witness them all over the place if you look.
by rdubs333 on 6/5/22, 8:45 PM