Tweets From Scott Hambrick

I built and sold a business that allowed me to retire at age 44. It was called Data Storage, Inc., information, knowledge, and records management is my jam. 10 Years ago I gave a speech about the half life of knowledge to a bunch of MBA aspirants at a university business school. This is the Twitter synopsis. The half life of knowledge is the time it takes for new knowledge to either be lost, or obsolete. We know what lost means. For knowledge to be obsolete, it loses its utility because it's irrelevant, applies to defunct systems, is found false, etc. Knowledge of fire escape routes in a long since destroyed building, refining whale oil for lamplight, and how to drive a manual transmission all might be examples of lost knowledge. At the time I gave the speech, we in the data management business estimated the half life of knowledge to be 18 months. 50 years ago it was closer to 18 years. The half life of knowledge is now probably closer to a year, maybe less. The Lindy effect, of course, tells us that the older knowledge is the more likely it is to get older yet. The knowledge about how to cook meat isn't going away anytime soon, but the instructions that came with your Temu junk are already gone. Most of the web that has existed has already disappeared and most of the web that exists will disappear in HALF that time. The costs to maintain a viable web page 500 years approaches infinity. Energy, disk space, indexing it into a growing database, format conversion for compatibility, etc makes this not likely. Archive and wiki are great ideas, but their expenses are infinite and the knowledge they are entrusted with will only last as long as the institutions operating them. What's the half life of institutions? Shorter daily. Our knowledge is going away. I've bemoaned all of this on podcasts for years. The biggest problem is that the half life of knowledge is so short now that hum...

...an experience is continually made irrelevant. Example, how you dated the kids mom 25 years ago is entirely irrelevant when you try to give dating advice to your 18 year old today. This pace of change is destroying our ability to parent. It's also destroying our ability to run profitable businesses as we must CONTINUALLY TRAIN employees, never cultivating or benefitting from an old head that's "seen it all in the industry" as the whole damned thing is different than it was 10 years ago and the old head needs training on Poonysis, the new ERP. This is yet another reason why wages are flat. It doesn't matter that much if you've been a machinist for 30 years, you'll need almost as much training this year as a 3 year machinist. AND the shop just got new a new CNC machine that you know nothing about, whereas their used to be men who ran a SINGLE LODGE AND SHIPLEY LATHE 40 HOURS PER WEEK FOR 40 YEARS STRAIGHT. That guy knew some hacks and cracks. This is what happens when financialization occurs. Making a product or service that lasts forever is a great way to go out of business as your competitors who can increase lifetime revenue from inferior products can BORROW MORE MONEY THAN YOU, and use that capital to drive their own costs down, market to new customers, etc. Permanence and durability is not rewarded and we ALL pay the price. Wisdom, knowledge test by experience, is dying. Wisdom, being impossible to obtain, makes older people less valuable. Parents seem entirely irrelevant to their children who only view them as resource providers. Grandparents are just a nuisance, like Grandpa Simpson Younger people, who are easier to train, are over valued. Ease of training means they are quicker to buy a new product, which drives companies to develop products that are marketed almost exclusively to youngs. Olds don't want to buy new stuff they have to learn. So, the business world and culture bec...

...omes more and more skewed towards the interests of people who haven't fully developed executive function yet. Adult contemporary music doesn't exist as a genre anymore for example. Almost NO ONE makes music for adults. Many such cases. For the 3 of you that has read all of this, what do you think we should do about it? I do have ideas. I'll save them for now. (View Tweet)