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Hasn't the amount of knowledge in math, science, and engineering been growing exponentially whereas our capability to learn and teach is still mostly linear? E
by kqr2 18y ago
Hasn't the amount of knowledge in math, science, and engineering been growing exponentially whereas our capability to learn and teach is still mostly linear?
Edit: Should also mention Malcolm Gladwell's recent book which posits that it takes on the order of 10000 hours to become an "expert" at something.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell...
- unalone 18y agoI think our capacity has expanded also. Not nearly quickly enough, but we can learn more now than we ever did before (or at the very least, we can cut out a lot of the noise in our learning experience).
- antiform 18y agoAlso, at least in math, while there is certainly more content than one can learn in a lifetime, with more content being created every day at an increasing rate, many different abstractions have been developed and clever analogies applied in order to simplify new learning.
- whacked_new 18y agoArgh... it's not Gladwell's book that posits the 10000 hours bit -- it's from Ericsson's research!
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mhartl 18y agoGladwell is so popular now that we'd better get used to this. Gladwell himself has lamented the phenomenon, but there's no stopping it, I fear.