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Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It
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The Half-Life of Facts
Facts decay over time. And the time it takes to disprove or replace half of it can be predicted.
Data in medicine become half as relevant in 2-3 years. For exact sciences, 2-4 years.
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Half life of facts and compound knowledge
If we want our knowledge to compound, we’ll need to focus on the invariant general principles.
Half-lives show us that if we spend time learning something that changes quickly, we might be wasting our time.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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The 5-Hour Rule
The most successful, busy people in the world dedicate at least 5 hours a week to deliberate learning.
The 5-Hour Rule is the most critical practice we can all adopt for long-term career suc...
The Simple Math
It takes about 6,400 hours of class time and studying to get a 4-year degree. Assume that it takes you only 5,000 hours to master your field.
While you are happy that you've prepared for your profession, the knowledge you've learned is fast becoming outdated. We can safely assume that in 10 years, 50% of the facts in the field would be outdated. This means that for you, just to keep up in your current field, you'd need to learn 5 hours per week, 50 weeks a year.
Trends To Consider
When we consider the future of work, there are two trends we should keep a note of. They are:
- Half-life of knowledge
- Law of increasing learning
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Learned Optimism in Psychology
This is a concept that suggests that we can always change our attitude and behaviour, be aware of our thoughts and stop our negative self-talk.
Learned Optimism is a positi...
Pessimism Vs Optimism
Pessimism is defined as the anticipation of good or bad things to happen in the future, while optimism is generally considered the opposite. Optimism can be defined as the individual difference variable reflecting the extent of which we hold positive expectancies for the upcoming event.
The ways in which we think affects our health, well-being and success, even though the situations are the same.
Benefits of Optimism
- A positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health.
- Provides motivation to work harder.
- Greater career success in life.
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Meta-Learning
It's knowing how to learn. Learning itself is a skill, and knowing how to do it well is an incredibly valuable advantage.
Merely acquiring information is not learning....
Learning has 2 phases
Learning is a two-step process:
- Read/listen: feeding ourselves new information.
- Process and recall what you’ve just ‘learned’: connecting new materials to what we already knew.
Remembering the right things
You should not waste your time by committing unimportant details to memory.
Your focus should be on understanding the bigger picture, on how things relate to each other.