How Important Is All This?

Now that I've been doing this for a month, the question of how important this all is is becoming more relevant. When you're in the middle of the hard slog of gathering data, it's normal to get frustrated. It's also normal to get a little grandiose in your thinking about the worth of what you're doing, partly to motivate yourself to keep going.

So how important is all this? If I come up with the finding that human knowledge doubles every ten years instead of every five, who will care? What will it change?

I mentioned a few things in an earlier post that I am starting to think are actually relevant questions for society. If we are convinced that human knowledge doubles every five years, then we don't need to quit smoking, as cancer will be cured before it strikes us. Similarly, we don't need to worry about pollution, because we'll sort it out before the effects can truly harm society. You can adopt this lazy attitude about any of the problems our world confronts.

But it would be a mortal pity if human knowledge doubles every six or ten or twelve years and you die of cancer the year before the cure is discovered instead of the year after.

The idea that human knowledge doubles every five years is widespread. A Google search using the term human knowledge doubles every five years returns 1,680,000 results (obviously only a fraction are relevant).

If that information is wrong, and individuals are making important decisions and organisations are misallocating resources in this mistaken belief, then yes, this research is important and worth doing. Gee, I feel reassured.