The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.20 (702 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B009EDCRN2 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 127 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-11-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Enjoyable ubpdqn I enjoyed this book and I believe it provides an important insight. It fits well with Thinking, fast and slow (Kahneman). The author starts with a deliberately fuzzy/loose pragmatic definition of "fact" and proceeds to explore the quantitative aspects of evolution (or temporal characteristics) of knowledge and information. He uses mathematical and statistical tools to explore patterns, suggesting common or universal mechanisms. In addition, the pitfalls and biases of dissemination . Better concept than execution It's a good idea about a true state of affairs, but maybe a trade book just can't do justice to this topic and the author's overarching hypotheses. It would take a tremendous amount of research and scholarship to support, or discard, Mr. Arbesman's hypotheses about the "facts" that society, especially "science," "knows." --Yes, that's a lot of scare quotes for the last third of one sentence, but that's what the book is, or needs to be, about: What are facts, and what does it mean t. Interesting, but could have been better Do you want to know how scientists get ever closer to the truth? This book goes into that, and it does so in an interesting and engaging way.But the discussion is somewhat incomplete. The author does not go into scientific fraud, even though there has been a number of high profile science fraud cases in recent years. I would have loved to have seen a discussion on how (if?) scientific fraud is detected, and rooted out of the literature.I also would have liked to have seen a discuss
Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowledge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread. New insights from the science of science. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. He shows that much of what we know consists of "mesofacts" - facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. Facts change all the time. Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics - literally the science of science. Just as we know that a chunk of uran