What is the best knowledge?

When faced with a challenge what knowledge to use and obtain I often think in categories of knowledge and its half-life.

Having analysed most of the areas I have drilled down most important categories for myself:

  1. Fundamentals – Math, Physics, Biophysics, Chemistry - t½ 100 years
  2. Human Health - t½ 50 years
  3. Finance specialised - t½ 20 years
  4. “Extreme” People bios - t½ ∞

Half-life

Comparing the half-life of knowledge to the lifespan of an Instagram post or a tweet, it becomes evident that information on platforms like social media quickly loses its relevance within a few minutes. In contrast, subjects like the structure of an atom, electron transport chain, and mitochondria respiration have enduring value and are vital to our understanding of life.

I pick categories with a strong, long half-life period → knowledge obtained is losing value the slowest, usually via fallibility experiments from new knowledge or removing artificial gatekeepers.

Recycling

Source of the information is a variable to consider. Most Instagram stories and YouTube videos are recycling content which has been sources from somewhere which is the ground truth.

Balancing real life experimentation (empirical) at X, reading old strong paper about X or watching YouTube videos about X are all ways to achieve the understanding - I have yet to understand what’s best as we all drown in the amount of information pouring out on all of us.

Fallibility

“The implications of that the wrong information is incalculable”. Recently, when listening to the Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin they mentioned that 50% of the current information we know about human health and in the medicine is outright wrong and implications are drawing the exponent on our fails.

Imagine consuming extra short half-life health/medical information from Instagram after the creator recycled it from the original source where the chance of the root, ground information being true is 50%! This is the level of the “challenging” we face to get information right as we stray from fundamentals (1) into higher abstractions and fun.

Related: Thinking as a science