Of course you can. The question is, whether the correlation is strong or weak, and what sign it has.
I'd argue the correlation is positive and somewhat strong, for the following reasons:
- Survivorship effect (not really bias in this context): old software that survived and is still used to this day survived for the reason. Old legacy systems in companies may survive because they're too expensive to replace, but old end-user software survived because it is good. Often, it's better than any new software - vi(m), Emacs and TeX all are - and so they kind of suck the oxygen out of the room (why build a new, better vim, when real vim can be made better faster?).
- The times of vi(m), Emacs and TeX were much saner. It was because web apps were the dominant mode of building end-user software, it was before SaaS was the dominant business model - and both of those incentivize bad software that's disrespectful of user's cognitive and computational resources (not to mention privacy). People cared more about end-user ergonomics than developer team velocity. People cared about performance, because it was a difference between a working and not-working application. Today's software doesn't care, because bad performance only means the user can't run more than few applications simultaneously, and that's not any individual vendor's problem.
So yeah, I find it to be a good heuristic that old end-user software that's still in use is going to be better than new software, if you're willing to overlook some idiosyncrasies of the past.
Sometimes these "idiosyncrasies" are quite relevant: LaTeX is still 8 bit and uses a number of fixed-size tables for managing objects (resulting in a numer of "weird" limitations), the way TeX processes documents is quite complex and not particularly fast (depending on what you compare it to), it only supports it's own fonts and none of the industry standards and so on
There's thousands of video games that are still around and are not 'good'. Win XP was used for years (decade?) and the question of it's goodness was up for debate for a long time. Something that's older will have more security issues. You can say WinXP did a lot of good things for it's time (sane networking, ect), but it's ability to fulfill the role 'good enough' waned pretty quickly.
Vim/emacs/notepad++ are all good enough text editors, there's not much call for machine learning ai on text editing, what new conceptual application is there for text editing tech? Excel has been the same for ten years because it fills a finite hole. There are other products that age quickly spill over to categories of programming that can always benefit from the infinity of detail or quality and don't fill a fixed finite hole. e.g. video games.
Yeah computers as a rising force of workhorse power is only now restarting. We had a period of stagnation for a while.
The basic tech behind it. The ui has changed a lot. There was an article a year or so ago saying the engineering team doesn't get a lot of big meaty change to do and new rotating managers push ui changes. A few details of that might be off, but the grid of cells has stayed.
Of course you probably don't want to correlate that but the fact these apps are battle-proven for so many years is a good sign if you search for something stable that you can rely on. Probably even in decades to come.
There is many creative solutions people come up with but if they are not tested long enough I would not be eager to do so on a production system if I wouldn't exactly know that everything will be fine (which is difficult in this case if it is not your domain).
You can survive for a long time doing bad or evil things. The theory stipulates a need to gauge health for a probabilistic outcome. For this correlation it has two parameters, time and health.
It also describes survival for non-alive, non-mechanical items. Implying no physical moving parts. There would be an interesting argument as to whether something that does not move can be judged as travelling across time, with or without being necessarily good? Surely to measure the success of an idea or thing you are also in part measuring the actions of creator or consuming humans, which muddies the water on the central non-alive point.
As an aside why is Taleb related stuff so popular here? I've only heard of him from one other place but he shows up a lot on HN.
