(Disclaimer: If you’re reading this, it’s probably wrong.)

  1. We often feel existential dread when we think of death or the dizzying scale of the universe or the sheer number of people going about their daily lives. But I think the rate of development of scientific knowledge is just as disorientating.
  2. The number of scientific publications is growing at a surprisingly fast rate. It’s not uncommon to read a bibliometric review from a particular discipline and to find that a majority of papers in that discipline have been published in the past 3 or 5 years.
  3. This is so weird! If you take the number of scientific publications to be a rough proxy of “stuff we know about a topic” (which I think is usually true to some extent, though not perfectly), then this means that most knowledge about a topic has only been known to experts for a couple of years.
  4. This also means that humanity, today, only know a fraction of what humanity will know in a couple of years.
  5. I think this is great reason to literally not listen to a single empirical statement that comes out of anybody’s mouth. (This is hyperbole, but not by much.)
  6. That is, if you want to know a fact (or more accurately, a working hypothesis) about the world, the best place to look is the most recent couple of review articles on that topic.
  7. This does mean that much of what we learn in school and even university is woefully outdated. I observe this all the time—when laypeople speak about topics that I am an expert in, they tend to speak in terms that are even 20-30 years old and have precious little to do with the current state of knowledge. On the flip side, I have already had to re-teach myself spatial information and data analysis multiple times because the data and tools are being developed so rapidly. And spatial information was my minor at university only 6 years ago!
  8. We might have been told in the past, by a perfectly reliable and well-informed source at the time, that it’s healthy to drink milk / it’s dangerous to use your phone when pumping petrol / most of the world lives in poverty / you should sleep 8 hours a day / palm oil is bad for orangutans / Jesus claimed to be the son of God / nature is a thing / you should end your sentence “John and I” rather than “me and John” / you belong to the species Homo sapiens / DNA governs biological development / criminals should be punished / whatever. But how frequently do people take the time to go and read the latest systematic review article on any of these questions? (And all of those questions are indeed the topic of serious academic scrutiny - very interesting topics in fact!)
  9. I find this to be such a disorenting and even absurd reality to face. It’s so easy to get up-to-date knowledge on a topic with a quick search of a database or even Google Scholar - but we only get that knowledge for the topics that we do take the time to search. For every other topic, our prior knowledge has a great chance of being woefully outdated.
  10. So this makes us extremely, unbelievably powerful (as we have the opportunity to have such detailed knowledge about the world), but very easily led astray (as we only have that knowledge when we choose to obtain it and are frequently misguided if we do not), and still less powerful than we will be tomorrow.
  11. The best analogy I can think of: you are in a large room, full of furniture and funky wallpaper and random antiques, when the light suddenly switches off, leaving you in the dark. All you have is a military-grade super powerful flashlight, but it’s from an alternative retro-steampunk universe; the torch is powered by physically winding it and only lasts for a few seconds before you have to wind it again. So you can see small patches of the room very well, but when you train your light on a patch of carpet or wall, you see that the room has changed significantly - maybe the carpet has totally changed or entire objects have appeared or disappeared - even in the time it takes to wind up your flashlight! Every day, somebody comes and replaces your flashlight - the new flashlight is more powerful, but takes even longer to wind!
  12. And tragically, this power is extremely unequally distributed - go ask the man on the street what a systematic review article is. We all learn the layout of the room while the ceiling light is on, but not everyone is given a flashlight to use after the ceiling light burns out.
  13. And think of all the days at school, wasted, being taught the layout of the room, and even being made to feel stupid and given fewer opportunities if you don’t learn the layout as thoroughly or easily as other kids - a double tragedy!
  14. Importantly, this has only been the state of affairs for a few decades (basically, since the dawn of the internet). Until then, “the thing I was told by a reliable source a few years ago” was a very decent prior guess for “humanity’s best knowledge about that thing today”. Sure, knowledge was constantly developing, but it was a gentle trot compared to today’s dizzying gallop. (This suggests that the current disconnect between “how we teach the young” and “how knowledge actually works” might merely be growing pains as society transitions from one state of affairs to another: the people currently in power were educated by people who were, in turn, educated when the previous state of affairs was indeed in effect. You would thus expect it to take about two generations for the inefficacy of the previous regime to be revealed by the harsh reality of contemporary knowledge generation [“Huh, I keep noticing that my empirical beliefs are demonstrably false, isn’t that strange?”] and therefore for institutions to catch up.)
  15. Perhaps we should let kids out of school once they demonstrate that they can a) find and critically interpret a review article, and b) teach themselves an entirely new skill. This would probably save a lot of time, energy, and sleep, then the children can go and spend their time—you guessed it—being children.