Title: Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It
Headings: Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It
Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It
The Basics
The Discovery of Half-Lives
“Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew.”
The Half-Life of Facts
The Half-Life of Secrets
“Our policy (at Facebook) is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is that there are not enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”
The Half-Lives of Careers and Business Models
The Burden of Knowledge
Conclusion

Content: The half-lives of drugs vary from a few seconds to several weeks. To complicate matters, biological half-lives vary for different parts of the body. Lead has a half-life of around a month in the blood, but a decade in bone. Plutonium in bone has a half-life of a century — more than double the time for the liver. Marketers refer to the half-life of a campaign — the time taken to receive half the total responses. Unsurprisingly, this time varies among media. A paper catalog may have a half-life of about three weeks, whereas a tweet might have a half-life of a few minutes. Calculating this time is important for establishing how frequently a message should be sent. “Every day that we read the news we have the possibility of being confronted with a fact about our world that is wildly different from what we thought we knew.” — Samuel Arbesman
The Half-Life of Facts
In The Half-Life of Facts: