A friend of mine showed me a video that tries to put some statistics into perspective. Some of them are pretty interesting, especially the ones that are easy to interpret but also easy to overlook. However, as with most things on the internet, a lot of it is false. And if not false, misleading. For example, the population of India roughly quadruples that of the United States. Apparently, this means that there are more honor’s kids in India than there are kids in the United States. I don’t have too many problems with this factually, but it seems to play into fears of outsourcing. Those Indian kids are not only stealing all of our cheap labor, but they are also smarter than us.
I had a bit more problems with this tidbit about education:
For those of you who didn’t watch the actual video, it makes the claim:
Technical information doubles every two years. Consequently, half of what students learn in their first year is outdated in their third year.
Wow! Shocking isn’t it? Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense. It seems to try too hard to piggyback on a similar statistic heard when talking about technology, particularly computing: Moore’s Law, where computing power (more accurately, number of transistors per area) doubles every 1.5 years. This law gives us a sense just how fast “bleeding edge” becomes obsolete. (Clearly, bleeding edge becomes obsolete every day, otherwise, it wouldn’t be bleeding edge.)
This claim is saying that half of what you learn in a year becomes obsolete in two years. I don’t see how doubling technical information renders half of my technical knowledge obsolete. Technology does not make equal progress on all fronts, and moreover, new fields are invented. And, how in the world do they even measure the amount of technical information produced in two years? So much of “new technical knowledge” consists of solve special cases of various problems. Solving a specific case does not void the relevance of a general solution.
To be honest, the biggest part I take issue with is that they say half of what I learn becomes outdated. I’m pretty sure everything I learn is already outdated to begin with. This is probably a good indication that I’m doing it wrong.
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