Consider my previous three blog posts:

  • In the first one, I argue that knowing stuff in our present reality requires constantly seeking and updating on new scientific information.
  • In the second one, I argue that doing stuff in our present reality requires constantly seeking and implementing new, more efficient tools and skills.
  • In the third one, I suggest some ways to manage this new reality.

In this post, I’ve got a quick counterargument to the whole idea that we are living in a particularly fast or dizzying reality.

This counterargument is called Wikipedia! (And to a lesser extent, book series like “Very Short Introductions” and “For Dummies”)

These provide ways to get a comprehensive and up-to-date view on scientific topics (and even skillsets, in the “For Dummies” case).

I’ve been particularly impressed with Wikipedia. Even in my own areas of expertise, I notice some occasional missed topics and missed details within topics, but overall the website tends to provide a comprehensive and rigorous summary of topics that is typically up-to-date with very recent scientific developments. (The accuracy of Wikipedia has been studied in scientific papers too, though I haven’t read the latest ones!)

I think the general view of Wikipedia as being a questionable source of evidence is unfortunate and misguided—this is essentially a crowd-sourced knowledge base written by passionate super-nerds (frequently, in fact, domain experts) that prizes accuracy and neutrality and has a built-in process of peer review. To me, that’s as close to the scientific process as you can get for a community that explicitly limits itself to summarising existing knowledge (as opposed to generating new knowledge).

The Very Short Introductions (for knowledge) and For Dummies series (for skills) are something like a middle ground—domain experts tasked with giving a comprehensive but up-to-date overview on a topic.

So these sources, and others like them, might offer the proverbial 80/20 of knowledge acquisition—accessing these sources is extremely cheap and the quality of information is very high. You can get higher-quality information by doing your own literature reviews, but the cost of doing so increases very steeply.

If this view is true, then perhaps our reality is not actually as dizzyingly fast as I have suggested previously.