> "In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong.... As facts are made and remade with increasing speed, Arbesman is worried that most of us don’t keep up to date."
It can take a lot longer than a half-century to catch up.
For example, it's surprising how often I hear people talk about "exponential" population growth, which was the going theory in 1798 [0] but known to be inaccurate by 1838 [1]. I hear similarly out-of-date comments on topics ranging from evolution to Bible manuscripts with shocking regularity.
People sometimes learn "facts" from trusted friends or preferred authority figures, who learned them the same way, going back generations without anybody thinking to double-check. I suspect the emotional cost of finding out a friend was wrong provides just enough friction to keep people from looking things up, even in a world with wikipedia and snopes at our fingertips.
To be fair, a lot of laypeople use "exponential" to mean superlinear. Not to mention that the "logistic function" you cited is essentially exponential until it hits saturation.
Laziness seems a far simpler and more believable reason why people don't double-check, not the emotional cost of finding a friend was wrong... or did I miss something?
It can take a lot longer than a half-century to catch up.
For example, it's surprising how often I hear people talk about "exponential" population growth, which was the going theory in 1798 [0] but known to be inaccurate by 1838 [1]. I hear similarly out-of-date comments on topics ranging from evolution to Bible manuscripts with shocking regularity.
People sometimes learn "facts" from trusted friends or preferred authority figures, who learned them the same way, going back generations without anybody thinking to double-check. I suspect the emotional cost of finding out a friend was wrong provides just enough friction to keep people from looking things up, even in a world with wikipedia and snopes at our fingertips.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...