Sea Level Rise and Age

2020-07-19

• When you live long enough, you acquire a broad and shallow knowledge by seeing and hearing many things
  • The “you learn, without realising it, from what is around you” effect.
• This resulted in a situation where “elders had an advantage over the young in a wide range of areas” in the past - old-man’s wisdom
  • Each was strong in their respective areas of expertise, but the elders were strong in areas that were not either of their specialties.
• This structure will be overturned by the development of technologies that reduce the cost of acquiring superficial knowledge.
  • Image of low elevation areas submerged by rising sea levelRise in sea level
    • see The emergence of a service that provides knowledge
  • Is it fair to say that the degree of shallow knowledge that was naturally acquired by living long enough without making an effort to acquire knowledge can now be easily acquired through search?
    • Without “There will be power.” you can’t take the action of searching.
      • Without the sense of “I don’t know the details, but I’m sure there must have been something like this,” no search behavior can be generated.
      • If you don’t know the keywords, your search is inefficient.
      • On the other hand, this level of knowledge can be acquired more efficiently in the past through properly designed social networking timelines.
      • Added 2023-03-31: If you don’t know the keywords, LLM will tell you.
  • Knowledge acquired without conscious effort remains old because it is not consciously updated.
    • Examples of old incorrect knowledge
      • ‘Programs cannot be patented on their own’ 2002.
      • ‘You can only expense up to 100,000.‘2006
      • Neon is a rare gas.”2005
  • Knowledge that we don’t know how we acquired tends to be perceived as “common sense.
    • Causes miscommunication with people who do not share your knowledge

relevance - I wrote about the sea level rise analogy in my column on the intellectual production of engineers. - Highway Parable - Updating knowledge is more burdensome than learning new things.

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