Sherlock Holmes on the Significance of Selective Knowledge

This is an except from Mind Macros 04.

“I consider that a man’s brain is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

​Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic.

​He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

​It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.

​There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.

​It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” — From A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle.

The world is awash in information. One study from 2011 found that if we transferred all the information on Earth to CDs and stacked them on top of one another, they would reach beyond the moon.

The same data stored in books would spread over every square inch of the United States, 13 layers high.

If a single star is equal to a byte of information, then there is a galaxy of data for each individual on Earth. This number is equivalent to 315 times the number of grains of sand on our planet.

The study above based its statistics on 295 billion gigabytes of data, the amount we had accumulated by 2011.

​In 2021, 74 trillion gigabytes of information were generated, 250 times more than the 2011 study estimated we had produced since the advent of the digital format. That works out to 202 billion gigabytes of data created every day in 2021.

We are now creating enough information every year that, if burned to CDs and stacked, it would extend 60 million miles farther than the moon.