Knowledge is potentially destroying progress.

Knowledge and free speech is potentially crippling the progress of humanity. If in 1970, you learned by books and maybe a teacher. In 2018, we learn by podcasts, forums, videos, blogs, and books. The problem is a lot of information is 1) repeated already, and sometimes inadvertently since people don’t always know if someone else has said the same thing, 2) inefficient – people love to tell long stories and such to help the entertainment portion of it, which entertainment is good if it creates emotion which helps us learn/retain info, but it’s often too much, and 3) not appropriately structured and 4) usually a disguised sales pitch for something else, usually proving expertise in a topic just enough to build trust, but not enough so that anyone’s learned anything of deep substance.

If you were to want to learn chemistry in 1970, you read a well organized and peer evaluated book that doesn’t repeat itself and is no sales pitch for something else and you learn chemistry. In the age of Google, you may be reading Chapter One 50 times over because of all the random YouTube videos, aimless but entertaining podcasts, incorrect info on a blog that’s being debated in the Discus forum below the article, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve wasted tremendous time and not gotten as far as the guy with the lone book. Knowledge…you can have too much of a good thing.