For example: the King James English Bible is surely very high on the Lindyness scale, massively influential, and on that basis deserves a place on every educated reader's library: but its also the source of bigotry, suffering and death for thousands of people. Do you stock it, or no?

Reading a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises.

One must also judge a book by their historical context.

The vast majority of the Bible is not at all influential on either our religious understanding or on general culture. Partly because most of it just isn't that commonly read. The popular parts are read thousands of times more commonly than the least popular parts, and many of the readers of the least popular parts (in our era) are people who have a deep religious commitment to reading the Bible, but who aren't necessarily prolific writers or influential thinkers.

The other fact at play here is that most of the unread parts are unread for a reason. There is a lot of material which is, of course, of historical or theological interest to experts, and which had undeniable spiritual significance to many people who lived long ago, but which is very hard for most modern readers to extract any real meaning or value from.

Some examples - each of these is taken not from the really obscure books, but from 'second-tier books', in order to demonstrate how quickly the long tail of Bible literature descends to filler.

The book of Numbers (part of the Pentateuch/Torah) mainly consists of pages and pages listing how many animals of different types should be sacrificed in various ways for different festivals. This is extremely repetitive stuff, pretty much beyond satire. There is no justification given for any of this doctrine, and once you have extracted a minimal amount of historical content ("it seems like cattle were more valuable than sheep!") it's on a par with reading the telephone book.

The book of Proverbs sounds fun, but do you know any of the proverbs it contains? Probably not many, because they consist of dozens of very small variations on the same message to embrace wisdom, as though there were some doubt about the advantages of wisdom. Sample: "Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence." The catchy phrasing and apt metaphors which you would hope for simply aren't here (barring a very small number, which stand out as being slightly less banal: "iron sharpens iron").

A couple of the Epistles of St Paul are deeply uplifting and moving pronouncements of the essence of belief in Christ. The rest (circa 20 books) are probably fascinating political history, if you have the background knowledge about the different early Christian thinkers and communities and the evolution of their doctrine. If you don't, they are hard to make much sense of - for example, thirty pages of careful analytic debate about circumcision, responding to someone else's letter which itself breaks down a third person's arguments, neither of which we have available to us.

The awkward truth about the notion of the 'Bible as literature' or the supposed cultural importance of the Bible, is that in modern secular times, it is a myth passed on from otherwise educated people who have read less than 5% of the Bible, to other educated people who are going to read even less of it.

You do not need the whole bible for that. The bible contain way more then cultural references and a lot of that more is mindnumbing boring.

Many people can read the same book and get different things from it, which is an interesting point to consider wrt the lindy effect. Some books are read differently over time, or by different groups/nations. The lindy effect can include books that are read for different reasons; undoubtedly people still read mein kampf, but for wholly different reasons (one hopes!)

He who drinks the old wine is probably more interested in history than he who drinks the new.

Not sure about stocking e.g. Mein Kampf, though. This one I would probably pass, due to disgust towards what the Nazis did. From another angle, I might be "brainwashed" here -- by the cultural meme that this is a Dangerous Book. I don't really know. In the end, it is still just a book. Can a book be dangerous in itself? Not sure that possessing it would turn somebody into a Nazi; a youngster's appreciation of those ideas is surely more complicated a mechanism than just reading a book.

Tangentially related: in my (post-soviet) country, there has been discussion whether former Soviet military buildings are a part of cultural heritage, or should they all be demolished. As a regular person, I'm definitely siding with keeping some of those buildings -- the Soviet occupation was a sad, devastating part of our past, and younger generations should have physical examples of what it was like. Whether those buildings will be used as some kind of cult objects etc -- this is a matter of values education at school or at home.

So I fully agree with @j7ake's comment in this thread that reading (or -- my addition -- possessing) a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises. Hiding the past won't work, I think.

Great angle @kjellsbells, though. Interesting to think about. Thanks for bringing this up.

History positions him as an inhuman monster, and rightly so metaphorically. We are conditioned to think that he was uniquely evil in an otherworldly sense, totally unlike us, and someone like him could never arise again because we don’t have monsters these days.

But he wasn’t a unique demon. He was a human, with human emotions and motivations and failings. It’s important to recognize him (and all the rest of the Nazis) as human, because the humans of today absolutely do have the capacity to become him again.

Excellent phrasing. I think you would love "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell [1]. What an incredible book -- oh, and, being released in 2009, it also fits my interpretation of "Lindy".

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kindly_Ones_(Littell_novel...

If you want to know who Hitler was as a human, read either "Hitler, by Kershaw Ian" or "Third Reich Trilogy by Richard Evans".

If you want someone to realize Hitler was not unique, make them read about other genocides, about Italy at the same time, about Stalin, about Japan, about slavery, about genocide of native americans and so on.

Also, I would highly NOT recommend it for someone who does not know actual German history, because that book contains ... well quite a few untrue claims. If you are in general interested in that period and read a lot, nothing wrong with reading it. But if you are not and this is the one historical book you decided to pick and recommend over all the others, then I have hard time to believe you are neutral in your pick.

While the author was very influential, I'm not sure if the book itself relevant.

Another reason the book is relevant, it clearly shows the power of propaganda and how books can be used to that end.

It's interesting from the perspective of historiography. But it's not relevant in the way the Bible, Quran or the Gita are.

> Other than that, it is a crappy book, the content sucks and the writing is abysmally bad. The latter fact was also something people thought back then, and most people who had the book at home didn't necessarily read it.

This was my point. And in the context of TFA, it's not Lindy.

> clearly shows the power of propaganda

It wasn't an effective instrument for propaganda. The book became popular because of Hitler, not the other way round.

This is of course dwarfed by the number of copies distributed after the Nazis came to power.

PS: ...and even though I'm agnostic, of course I have the bible in my book shelf and occasionally read it, if only for the entertainment value (not the King James version though, but the Luther version).

But are you afraid reading it will turn you into a murderous bigot?

The Lindy effect is concerned with survival, which is affected to a large degree by, in this case, memetic fitness, which these books have in spades.

It took a while for us as a community to realize that such a Jedi weapon can easily slice your fingers off, because before the internet the worst that would happen is "it crashed again" but that was kind of normal.

I like this strategy because it maximizes the value you get out of old books while you minimize the value of new books. A phenomenal and important book could be published today but the optimal strategy is to die before the Lindy effect becomes apparent and let another generation enjoy its value. This makes sense because books have a finite value that is divisible by the number of readers they get.

Let's say there are two universes U1 and U2 and a book A which is identical in both. In U1, book A gets 100 readers, while the same book in U2 gets 1000 readers. I think most people would say that the book has the same value in both universes, independent of how many read it.

Maybe your thought process involves the physical condition of a book (there is more wear and tear as it passes through more readers), but I'd like to understand your point of view.

The thing is, we have so much brilliant art and literature available that you need to filter it somehow. The likelihood that something released this year is better than something that has been heralded and great for 100 years is very, very low. Not impossible, mind you. I've definitely read modern books that have had a huge impact on me (including, ironically, Taleb, who introduced me to the Lindy effect), and art and music have a certain cultural context that can make modern expressions more relevant.

I just sell my books quite frequently and keep only the ones that resonated with me. I'll also buy books after having read them as an ebook

So on the one hand recency bias results in us giving undue attention to new books. On the other hand we are too forgiving to classics. There is no lesson here. Finding the right books to read is hard and you can't trust reviews.

Yeah, I've struggled with this a lot -- e.g. still having trouble reading the works of Dostoevsky because of those endless walking-in-the-park-and-philosopising dialogues. These seem alien in my time and culture.

I suppose you have to sense the characteristics of that 50-year-old language -- and see the universal, timeless ideas behind that language. Language is a tool, a form. It does change quite a bit in 50 (or 100) years, whereas the general ideas change much less IMO. To a large degree, this is a "seeing forest for the trees" thing.

But yes, of course some modern books will end up standing the test of time as well. But it's hard to judge that a priori without actually reading the book yourself.

You will spend a finite amount of time reading in your life. If you read Dark Matter now, that could for example mean that you will never end up reading Dune, or The Count of Monte-Cristo. If you're gonna sit down and read, an older book is a much safer bet if you want to maximize the value of your limited time.

Still, modern books can sometimes offer other qualities that simply don't exist in older books. Sci-Fi is a great example of that, where scienctific developments affect the writing deeply. So (unfortunately) in certain cases you might have to gamble on a newer book. But I try to avoid that.

> an older book is a much safer bet if you want to maximize the value of your limited time

I 100% disagree with that. Value is highly subjective. I've read a lot of the books that are considered as "the most important books from the western hemisphere" and let me tell you, most of it is garbage. It's just a classic because back in the day it was novel and exciting, nothing else like it. You can have a good time with both, modern and old books. It's about your selection process, not the age of the book.

Reading has multiple purposes. Entertainment and education, most importantly. So I read books depending on the goal I want to achieve.

PS: if you read the commercial garbage from reading lists and what's new, you'll have a bad time, granted. As everybody can write a book nowadays, quality is harder to find tho.

I have that. My three adult children read none of them.