Sean Goh's Reviews > The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date

Interesting perspective on how scientific knowledge has an expiry date, though draggy at times. The bit about exponential growth propelling innovation seems to jar against the notion of sustainability, though allusions to logistic curves and carrying capacities alleviate that somewhat.
tl;dr - don't be so sure of what you know.

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Perhaps more derivative fields (e.g. medicine) move more slowly compared to the basic areas of knowledge on which they depend.

By their 40s, Nobel laureates are first authors on only 26% of their papers, as compared to their less accomplished contemporaries (56%). Nicer people are indeed more creative, successful, and likely to win Nobel prizes.

If you uttered the statement "80% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today" nearly anytime in the past 300 years, you'd be right. (exponential growth of people doing science)

When someone develops a new innovation, it is largely untested. It might be better than what is currently in use, but it is clearly a work in progress. Thus the new technology is initially only a little better. As it becomes refined (the bit that distinguishes engineering and practical application from basic science), they begin to realise the potential of this new innovation.

Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behaviour of the universe and all it contains: engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.
Science modifies what we know about the world, technology modifies what we can do in the world.

Many economists argue that population growth has grown hand in hand with innovation and the development of new facts (cities as hotbeds of innovation).

Berlin's expanse grew according to a simple rule of thumb: the distance reachable in 30 minutes or less. A city can be said to be a place where people can easily interact.

Facts spread by social networks. And medium strength ties are the most important for such spread. They are the happy medium between weak ties that don't spread anything, and strong ties that don't spread new information (informationally inbred).

Hidden knowledge has many forms. At its most basic level it can consist of pieces of information that are unknown, or are known only to a few, and for all practical purposes, still need to be revealed. Other times it includes facts that are part of undiscovered public knowledge, when bits of knowledge need to be connected to other pieces of information in order to yield new facts.

Revolutions in science have often been preceded by revolutions in measurement.

Atomic weights vary, based on which country a sample is taken from, or even what type of water the element is found in, can give a different isotope mixture.

As the saying among doctors goes: hurry up and use a new drug while it still works.

The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely it is the research findings are to be true. If an effect is small, we could simply be measuring noise.

Scientists rarely perform confirmatory replications of experiments. "I've got my own science to do".

John Maynard Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

A surefire way of adhering to a certain viewpoint: have a close relative take the opposite position.

Whichever bias we are subject to, factual inertia permeates our entire lives.

We have a tendency to reject anything newer than our own childhood.

Science is also subject to our baser instincts: Data is hoarded, scientists refuse to collaborate, and grudges can play a role in peer review.

By not relying on our own memories, we become more likely to be up-to-date in our facts, because the newest knowledge is more likely to be online than in our own heads.

Errors do not lead us away from the truth. They edge us incrementally toward it.