Finally, the obvious question: what extra information do you mentally track, which is crucial to performing some task well?
I track the age of data.
Here are a couple examples of how this is helpful:
Wikipedia has case counts by country for the 2022 monkeypox outbreak. Portugal was one of the leading countries for a while in number of confirmed cases, but it has since been surpassed by others. However, on closer inspection, the numbers for Portugal haven’t been updated since the 7th of July, 5 days ago. In the context of exponential growth, that matters a lot!
I’m developing an aptamer for my MS thesis. Currently, I’m looking at the highest-affinity aptamers in the main online database, which has ~750 examples. This aptamer has impressive affinity, in the fM range. However, I notice that the paper announcing it was published in 1997. This suggests either that the database is not well-maintained (in which case I shouldn’t rely on it to be an accurate representation of the state of the field), or that the field of aptamer research is not improving in terms of its ability to produce high-affinity aptamers (in which case that is a worrisome sign for either technology itself or capacity of the research community to achieve its potential).
I track the age of data.
Here are a couple examples of how this is helpful:
Wikipedia has case counts by country for the 2022 monkeypox outbreak. Portugal was one of the leading countries for a while in number of confirmed cases, but it has since been surpassed by others. However, on closer inspection, the numbers for Portugal haven’t been updated since the 7th of July, 5 days ago. In the context of exponential growth, that matters a lot!
I’m developing an aptamer for my MS thesis. Currently, I’m looking at the highest-affinity aptamers in the main online database, which has ~750 examples. This aptamer has impressive affinity, in the fM range. However, I notice that the paper announcing it was published in 1997. This suggests either that the database is not well-maintained (in which case I shouldn’t rely on it to be an accurate representation of the state of the field), or that the field of aptamer research is not improving in terms of its ability to produce high-affinity aptamers (in which case that is a worrisome sign for either technology itself or capacity of the research community to achieve its potential).