Home > Author > Samuel Arbesman
1 " While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in turn split into further exceptions and rules, yielding an increasingly complicated, branching structure. "
― Samuel Arbesman , Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
2 " Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew. "
― Samuel Arbesman , The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
3 " many medical schools inform their students that within several years half of what they’ve been taught will be wrong, and the teachers just don’t know which half. "
4 " But only through replication can science be the truly error-correcting enterprise that it is supposed to be. Replication allows for the overturning of results, as well as an approach toward truth, and is what science is ultimately about. "
5 " Facts change in regular and mathematically understandable ways. "
6 " Simkin and Roychowdhury conclude, using some elegant math, that only about 20 percent of scientists who cite an article have actually read that paper. This means that four out of five scientists never take the time to track down a publication they intend to use to buttress their arguments. By examining these mutations we can trace these errors backward in time, and understand how knowledge truly spread from scientist to scientist, instead of how it appeared to spread. "
7 " Double the population of a city, and it doesn’t simply double its productivity; it yields productivity and innovation that is more than doubled. These relationships have been found in patents, a city’s gross metropolitan product, research and development budgets, and even the presence of so-called supercreative individuals, such as artists and academics. "
8 " Science requires an idea to be refutable. It is not good enough for a concept to seem compelling; it must have the potential for a new fact to come along and render it false. "
9 " Change blindness in the world of facts and knowledge is also a problem. Sometimes we are exposed to new facts and simply filter them out. But more often we have to go out of our way in order to learn something new. Our blindness is not a failure to see the new fact; it’s a failure to see that the facts in our minds have the potential to be out-of-date at all. "
10 " But we can also be aided by something more general, to which this book has hopefully acted as a guide: recognizing the regularities in how knowledge changes around us. "
