Stat­ing that our “real­ity is out of date” and coin­ing the term “meso­facts” for those pieces of knowl­edge that pass us by unawares, Samuel Arbesman shows why con­tin­u­ous learn­ing and gen­er­al­i­sa­tion are advan­ta­geous behav­iours–or at least that spe­cial­i­sa­tion to the degree that it is cur­rently encour­aged is outdated.

Slow-changing facts are what I term “meso­facts.” Meso­facts are the facts that change nei­ther too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend mid­dle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For exam­ple, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chem­istry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chem­istry peri­od­i­cally, you would not real­ize that there are 12 new ele­ments in the Peri­odic Table. Over a tenth of the ele­ments have been dis­cov­ered since you grad­u­ated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is aston­ish­ing and a bit humbling. […]

Our schools are biased against meso­facts. The arc of our edu­ca­tional sys­tem is to be treated as lit­tle gen­er­al­ists when chil­dren, absorb­ing bits of knowl­edge about every­thing from biol­ogy to social stud­ies to geol­ogy. But then, as we grow older, we are encour­aged to spe­cial­ize. This might have been use­ful in decades past, but in our increas­ingly fast-paced and inter­dis­ci­pli­nary world, lack­ing an even approx­i­mate knowl­edge of our sur­round­ings is unwise.

So what’s this I hear about Pluto?