This meant that some of the information had to be rendered obsolete with time. Scientometrics shows us that facts are always changing, and much of what we know is or soon will be incorrect. Indeed, much of the available published research, however often it is cited, has never been reproduced and cannot be considered true. Many researchers are incentivized to find results that will please those giving them funding. Intense competition makes it essential to find new information, even if it is found in a dubious manner.
Yet we all have a tendency to turn a blind eye when beliefs we hold dear are disproved and to pay attention only to information confirming our existing opinions.
As an example, Arbesman points to the number of chromosomes in a human cell. Up until , 48 was the accepted number that medical students were taught. In , it had been declared an established fact by a leading cytologist. They declared the true number to be During their research, Tjio and Levan could never find the number of chromosomes they expected.
Discussing the problem with their peers, they discovered they were not alone. Plenty of other researchers found themselves two chromosomes short of the expected Many researchers even abandoned their work because of this perceived error.
But Tjio and Levan were right for now, anyway. As Arbesman puts it, facts change incessantly. Many of us have seen the ironic in hindsight doctor-endorsed cigarette ads from the past. A glance at a newspaper will doubtless reveal that meat or butter or sugar has gone from deadly to saintly, or vice versa.
We forget that laughable, erroneous beliefs people once held are not necessarily any different from those we now hold. The people who believed that the earth was the center of the universe, or that some animals appeared out of nowhere or that the earth was flat, were not stupid. They just believed facts that have since decayed. Arbesman gives the example of a dermatology test that had the same question two years running, with a different answer each time.
This is unsurprising considering the speed at which our world is changing. Our world seems to be in constant flux. With our knowledge changing all the time, even the most informed people can barely keep up.
All this change may seem random and overwhelming Dinosaurs have feathers? When did that happen? This order is regular and systematic and is one that can be described by science and mathematics. The order Arbesman describes mimics the decay of radioactive elements.
Whenever new information is discovered, we can be sure it will break down and be proved wrong at some point. If we zoom out and look at a particular body of knowledge, the random decay becomes orderly. Through probabilistic thinking, we can predict the half-life of a group of facts with the same certainty with which we can predict the half-life of a radioactive atom. The problem is that we rarely consider the half-life of information. Many people assume that whatever they learned in school remains true years or decades later.
Medical students who learned in university that cells have 48 chromosomes would not learn later in life that this is wrong unless they made an effort to do so. OK, so we know that our knowledge will decay. What do we do with this information? Arbesman says,. We would end up going a little crazy as we frantically tried to keep up with the ever changing facts around us, forever living on some sort of informational treadmill. Facts change in regular and mathematically understandable ways.
And only by knowing the pattern of our knowledge evolution can we be better prepared for its change. Recent initiatives have sought to calculate the half-life of an academic paper. Ironically, academic journals have largely neglected research into how people use them and how best to fund the efforts of researchers.
Research by Philip Davis shows the time taken for a paper to receive half of its total downloads. While most forms of media have a half-life measured in days or even hours, 97 percent of academic papers have a half-life longer than a year. Engineering papers have a slightly shorter half-life than other fields of research, with double the average 6 percent having a half-life of under a year.
This makes sense considering what we looked at earlier in this post. Health and medical publications have the shortest overall half-life: two to three years. Physics, mathematics, and humanities publications have the longest half-lives: two to four years. In the past, a government secret could be kept for over 25 years. Nowadays, hacks and leaks have shrunk that time considerably. Swire writes:. During the Cold War, the United States developed the basic classification system that exists today.
Under Executive Order , an executive agency must declassify its documents after 25 years unless an exception applies, with stricter rules if documents stay classified for 50 years or longer. These time frames are significant, showing a basic mind-set of keeping secrets for a time measured in decades. In the past, it was often difficult to get information published. Newspapers feared legal repercussions if they shared classified information.
Anyone can now release secret information, often anonymously, as with WikiLeaks. Governments cannot as easily rely on media gatekeepers to cover up leaks. Rapid changes in technology or geopolitics often reduce the value of classified information, so the value of some, but not all, classified information also has a half-life.
As an aside, if you were to invert the problem of all these credit card and SSN leaks, you might conclude that reducing the value of possessing this information would be more effective than spending money to secure it. The whole limit in the system is that there are not enough people who are trained and have these skills today.
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Literally How to use a word that literally drives some pe Is Singular 'They' a Better Choice? The awkward case of 'his or her'. Take the quiz. After another fifty years, a quarter-pound will be left undecayed, and so on. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! Also called biological half-life. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms.
Also called half-life period. Words nearby half-life half-joking , half landing , half-lap joint , half-leather , half-length , half-life , half-light , half-line , half-liter , half-long , half-mad. How to use half-life in a sentence Eric Garcetti succeeded Villaraigosa and has received high marks in his first year and a half on the job. Hilda Lessways Arnold Bennett. Davy and The Goblin Charles E. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift.
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