The half-life of facts

What Hacker News says

1. boilerupncJan 2018
   Related to this is scientometrics, the science of science. It grew out of bibliometrics, the science of books and research papers. Others have observed a rate of decay (e.g. how long does it take for knowledge/facts within a discipline to change or be overturned) and attempted to quantify it for various disciplines. It's interesting to see how slow/fast facts in Medicine change versus philosophy versus religion. A nice read about this topic is a book by Samuel Arbesman, "The Half-Life of Facts".
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2. motdiemMar 2016
   The wikipedia article links to it, but I'd recommend "The Half Life of Facts", which introduced me to this concept - it's an entertaining and insightful read.
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3. chris_dcostaMar 2013
   The Half Life of Facts

   Most useful explanation I have found to explain why the pre-internet age grown-ups (that would also be me) get stuck thinking that facts remain always the same.

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4. breckSep 2018
   Well a large 1M Homo sapiens multiomics dataset with 100+ clinical variables would be great. :) ... the data gets more and more interesting the more variables you have, but generally all the government datasets reduce number of variables for privacy reasons. That’s why if perhaps there was a way to get access to the quantity of data on something like GEO or TCGA, but with full clinical, from healthcare providers, you might find some interesting things.

   I would like to see more research as dashboards more than research as reports. The book “The Half-life of Facts” is relevant: many bio conclusions we’ve made in the past hundred years seems to later be contradicted or at least tweaked as new tech and data come out. NIH and others now have big pushes for personalized medicine, like NCIs Precision Medicine Initiative, because it’s pretty obvious that a great medicine or piece of advice for one person is useless or even harmful to another. The amount of health data we’ve collected in all of human history will be dwarfed by the amount of data we will collect in 2028. Instead of looking back on data and making static conclusions, what if we wrote the code that adjusts the conclusions as more and more data come in. So the research findings will be “updated” continuously, like modern software, as opposed to shipping once in the form of a paper.

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5. breckMar 2018
   Some people have researched this.

   I remember reading "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Arbesman, and IIRC psychology papers had some of the lowest half-lives of all the sciences. In math the half-life of a paper was something like 85 years, but in pysch it was closer to 10. I forget the exact statistics and don't have the book here but it was pretty interesting.

   Scientometrics and Eurekometrics are two areas of research that delve into this sort of thing more.

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6. dredmorbiusSep 2016
   Can anyone with access to the book please answer whether or not Geoffrey West, Joseph Tainter, or W. Brian Arther are among the cited references?

   I'm flipping quickly through a copy of Arbesman's The Half-Life of Facts and am disappointed to see that he (or his editors) have fallen prey to the gross misconception that numbered footnotes and bibliographies somehow diminish a book's value. Quite the opposite. (THLoF has end notes, but they're not indicated within the text, and insted reference pages and passages, which is a form of torture to be included in a future revision of the Geneva Convention.)

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