What is true, is we ought to get as much empirical data as possible before we settle on the "facts."
Posted on 01/03/2013 7:37:50 PM PST by neverdem
Old truths decay and new ones are born at an astonishing rate.
Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.
In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current).
Fact-making is speeding up, writes Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, the science of measuring and analyzing science. As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don’t keep up to date. That means we’re basing decisions on facts dimly remembered from school and university classes—facts that often turn out to be wrong.
In 1947, the mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Price stacked them in chronological order by decade, and he noticed that the number of volumes doubled about every 15 years, i.e., scientific knowledge was apparently growing at an exponential rate. Thus the field of scientometrics was born.
Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data, and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually for the last three centuries. In 1965, he exuberantly observed, “All crude measures, however arrived at, show to a first approximation that science increases exponentially, at a compound interest of about 7 percent per annum, thus doubling in size every 10–15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began.”
A 2010 study in the journal Scientometrics, looking at data between 1907 and 2007, concurred: The “overall growth rate for science still has been at least 4.7 percent per year.”
Since knowledge is still growing at an impressively rapid pace, it should not be surprising that many facts people learned in school have been overturned and are now out of date. But at what rate do former facts disappear? Arbesman applies to the dissolution of facts the concept of half-life—the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate. For example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years. Applying the concept of half-life to facts, Arbesman cites research that looked into the decay in the truth of clinical knowledge about cirrhosis and hepatitis. “The half-life of truth was 45 years,” he found.
In other words, half of what physicians thought they knew about liver diseases was wrong or obsolete 45 years later. Similarly, ordinary people’s brains are cluttered with outdated lists of things, such as the 10 biggest cities in the United States.
Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” Still, knowledge marches on, spawning new facts and changing old ones.
Another reason that personal knowledge decays is that people cling to selected “facts” as a way to justify their beliefs about how the world works. Arbesman notes, “We persist in only adding facts to our personal store of knowledge that jibe with what we already know, rather than assimilate new facts irrespective of how they fit into our worldview.” All too true; confirmation bias is everywhere.
So is there anything we can do to keep up to date with the changing truth? Arbesman suggests that simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us humble and ready to seek new information. Well, hope springs eternal.
More daringly, Arbesman suggests, “Stop memorizing things and just give up. Our individual memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” Through the Internet, we can “search for any fact we need any time.” Really? The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.
Toward the end of his book, Arbesman suggests that “exponential knowledge growth cannot continue forever.” Among the reasons he gives for the slowdown is that current growth rates imply that everyone on the planet would one day be a scientist. The 2010 Scientometrics study also mused about the growth rate in the number of scientists and offered a conjecture “that the borderline between science and other endeavors in the modern, global society will become more and more blurred.” Most may be scientists after all. Arbesman notes that “the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously has been growing exponentially, with a doubling time of about seven and a half years.” This suggests that brain/computer linkages will one day be possible.
I, for one, am looking forward to updating my factual knowledge daily through a direct telecommunications link from my brain to digitized contents of the Library of Congress.
You don’t have to imagine entirely. We already know, for instance, how the infamous “hockey stick” graph was concocted. Tracing the impact of it and how error was compounded upon it is infinitely more complex, but at least we know the launchpad for much of their adventures beyond reality.
That almost certainly wasn’t written by Eisenhower himself. But he had the sand to say it, which is more than I can say for all state-worshipping politicians since.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that Fred and Wilma didn't live next door to Barney and Betty in Bedrock.
The original author has made a major mistake in terminology. A fact is something that can be proved; facts don’t change. What he is calling fact is inference, or conclusions drawn from facts. As our knowlege increases, including more facts, the inferences we make from that knowlege can change, sometimes drastically.
What is true, is we ought to get as much empirical data as possible before we settle on the "facts."
To paraphrase Yogi Berra’s dictum: fifty percent of life is ninety percent mental. So there.
In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current).
Facts do no change. The definition of a fact is that it is a true statement, thus it cannot change. Our apprehension of truth, our perception of what is, in fact, a fact, can change but the fact itself cannot change. Those facts that “changed” as described in the opening paragraph were not facts but merely mistaken opinions about facts.
What did he call the Judicial/law enforcement/prison complex.
The military/industrial has killed more people in other Countries however the JLP complex is the one Americans need to fear as they will use tools supplied by the MI on citizens of the USA
So then just what the hell was in all those brontosaurus burger I ate?!!!
Facts are circumstances that are changeable like the wind. Truth (technically with a capital "T") is derived from the Bible, God's Word, and is absolute - Truth never changes. I suppose you could talk about the "truth" about the "facts" but again, the truth aspect focuses on universal, unchanging principles, so interchanging "fact" and "truth" tends to confuse things.
For example, maybe the medical report says I have cancer. That's a fact, Jack. But then God tells me in His Word, the Bible, that "By His [Jesus'] stripes I am healed" (Isaiah 53:5, 1 Peter 2:24). That's the truth.
The circumstances of the medical report and symptoms are subject to change, and often do change. However, the truth of God's Word, that Jesus took all my disease upon Himself, never changes - it is always true no matter what. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Matthew 24:35, Mark 13:31, Luke 21:33. And that's the truth.
...for sufficiently large values of 2.
As for the recent "Fiscal Cliff" deal, Eisenhower said this in his Farewell Address.
"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
As I said, Ike was a very wise man.
“Life is becoming more like one long root canal appointment... “
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That appears to be the goal of our current regime, to make sure that we are all miserable all of the time. Their excuse for doing this will be that their intention was to make life a paradise for everyone. What was that old line about paving a road to somewhere?
Truth and fact are not perfectly synonymous, but are so on a certain level. Fact is associated with empirical reality. It covers what happens in actual reality. Truth may be about existence, but also applies to abstractions. We don’t need to experience two plus two squalling four, for instance with rocks we pick up from the ground, to know it’s true. That’s something we know by deduction.
Bring God into the balance, and you may have the embodiment of abstract Truth altering facts, as He supposedly has that power. He can stop the earth turning on its axis, for instance, or create a baby born to a woman but not of man. It remains unclear whether He may mess with truth, for instance by contradicting himself. Could He create a boulder so heavy that not even He could lift it?
“The circumstances of the medical report and symptoms are subject to change, and often do change.”
This is not the same as facts changing, I hope you realize. Either the reports are wrong or the condition of your body is different from what it was before. Which means there are new facts to consider, not that previous facts have changed. It remains factual that your symptoms were so and so yesterday even if they are different today.
Seriously the leaders that be with the media picked us a candidate that had as much chance as a piece of soggy bread winning. They took out all the others that were better with hit pieces and supposed “scandals” that never materialized into anything. I think we’d end up with a better pick if they didn’t drop out for reasons other than political, and everyone had a chance to vote for all major runners across the country rather than a few places at a time. Let the top guy in the field get the nomination.
Because Romney didn’t start to get any real attention until better candidates got picked off and he was relatively better than who else was left.
In other words treat the nominee process like a primary election.
The other realization is that the socialists mobilized the takers more than our side mobilized the makers. For a bunch of various reasons.
Well things like Obama being a lifelong Christian I got from his own scampaign website...
“Ninety percent of everything is crap.” - Theodore Sturgeon
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