What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.
Wisdom is dead. Long live information.
Today's brains are yesterday's mashed potatoes.
Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.
In chess, knowledge is a very transient thing. It changes so fast that even a single mouse-slip sometimes changes the evaluation.
Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional - to become what everyone believes - the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.
Beware of assumptions that seem "obvious" in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.
We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?
At some point, the time will have passed when individuals are capable of major discoveries.
I'm a victim of Developaralysis: the crippling sense that the software industry is evolving so fast that no one person can possibly keep up.
The knowledge of one generation is the ignorance of the next.
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
When we think about the workplace, people think about hard skills being dominant, but they're not. The employer realizes knowledge will shift quickly, and there's a half-life to knowledge in this world.
In today's fast-changing world, it's not so much what you know anymore that counts, because often what you know is old. It is how fast you learn. That skill is priceless.
