YouSaid · the spoken record

Samuel Arbesman

lines on the record: 55
first: 2016-11-28
most recent: 2016-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think ideally, I think practically maybe I don't always as much as I should, but I know when people talk about, maybe it's more like how I kind of think about information. So for example, when people talk about how the internet and Google is ruining our brains or our memories, I am actually much more positively inclined towards those technologies simply because if we don't necessarily have as good memories anymore, it means that we now actually have to look things up more often and make sure we actually have the information correct, which means we are more likely to have the most up-to-date bit of knowledge. So I actually think those kinds of things are really good. And I think for me, after working on that book, I think it's also, I just, I've gotten better at delighting in being wrong and having the facts that I thought were true, being overturned. Because I know this is the way of the world. And I think this is kind of, and for me, it's more just having a scientific mindset.”
2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a whole slew of things that we often learn the same way we learn the unchanging facts, like things like how many billions of people there are on the planet or how many elements there are in the periodic table. These things change, but they might change over the course of decades or over the course of a human lifetime. And these kind of meso facts, they're sort of in this weird category where we learn them once, but we really should be updating them mentally. So I wrote this little essay about it, and it got a lot of attention, a number of agents and publishers contacting me and said, do you think there's a book in there? And since I've been thinking about this, I said yes. And I'm excited to kind of tell the story of the larger picture of how knowledge grows and changes and kind of the science of science and science of information growth and change.”
2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always been interested in writing and kind of writing for popular audiences. And I had been playing in the space of thinking about the science of science and kind of the nature of how what we know changes and kind of like looking actually at the regularities of this and trying to understand how to quantify this kind of area. And I had even begun in kind of in the early stages of doing some research related to that, but then actually wrote this little piece about what I called mesofacts. So mesofacts were sort of facts that bits of information that change neither too slowly nor too rapidly. They're sort of at the middle or mesoscale. The idea is that it's a knowledge that change very, very rarely like how many consonants there are on the planet. You learn those once. You're good. Then there's bits of information that change fairly quickly. Like what the stock market closed at yesterday or what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. We're pretty good at updating those kinds of information.”
2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, so I did that. And then, of course, I think the next summer or several summers after that, I was a camp counselor at a day camp. So it really wasn't like, oh, from there, I was like doing nothing but science. But yeah, I guess it had an impact.”
2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first job. And this is including even little part time jobs and stuff like that. First job that I can really remember, I spent, and I'm not even totally sure I was paid for this, but it felt job like I spent a summer being essentially like a lab tech in a electrochemistry company that was owned by family friends of ours. And I spent essentially kind of like a bottle washer slash data collector. But it gave me my first exposure to the world of science and research.”
2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT