Language lies at the heart of human education, culture and identity. When a language dies __41__ culture, identity and knowledge that __42__ from generation to generation through and __43__ that language. Knowledge about local land management, lake and sea technology, plant cultivation and animal husbandry may die with a language. __44__ language contains a view of the universe, a particular understanding of the world. If there are 6,000 living languages, __45__ there are 6,000 overlapping ways to describe the world. That variety provides a rich mosaic.

   As some states in America moved to open their economies from the pandemic lockdown, The New York Times reported that a government model predicted a dramatic increase in the death toll from COVID-19. The estimate that nearly 3,000 people would die per day by June __46__ by the modeler, who said the data was incomplete. __47__ the report came the same day that another modeling group sharply increased their forecast of how many would die of the disease. The new estimate of nearly 135,000 deaths by August is more than double what the group was predicting just three weeks ago. The group, at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, __48__ advising the White House on COVID-19 policy. But it is __49__ the only group modeling the pandemic’s trajectory. Data analysis blog FiveThirtyEight.com highlights six major groups __50__ of death toll predictions vary by tens of thousands. Differences among their state-level forecasts are even more significant

   Many human superstitions start with this fallacy. A baseball player wears uncomfortable underwear while hitting a grand slam. From then on, that same tight, hole-pocked pair of underpants becomes part of his uniform. The fallacy has a fancy name: it’s a post hoc fallacy, from the Latin post hoc ergo propter hoc, which means “after this, therefore because of this.” People commit this fallacy when they think that a correlation - one thing happening with something else - is a cause. Some parents resist getting life-saving vaccinations for their two-year-olds because some kids get diagnosed with autism soon after they get their shots. Autism is detectable just about the same age that kids get their two-year vaccinations. That leads a few parents to think that vaccinations cause autism, even though science has clearly proven they don’t. 

The post hoc fallacy tends to hit us in subtle ways. A student parties all night and aces an exam. Conclusion: Partying strengthens his mental faculties! Never mind that he was paying extra attention in class and had already read the material thoroughly. Or you go on holiday and it rains the entire week. “I’m sorry,” you say to the hotel manager. “I made it rain.” Even if you were slightly kidding, you were committing an easy fallacy. If, however, you really did make it rain, you should switch careers. Farmers would pay you good money. (modified from Heinrichs, 2018)

   Our society today is implicitly providing an infrastructure for outsourcing knowledge. Most of us wouldn’t know how to get grain seeds, how to sow, till, harvest them, make flour, make bread and so on. Most of the things that we rely upon every single day are beyond our capability of producing, and for most of them we don’t even have the knowledge required. Yet this is not a problem, our knowledge is about using something that someone else had produced and made available. We accept this implicitly because, by far, this works. Besides, there is no alternative. A single person would not have the possibility to possess all the knowledge that is now available and that is required to run our life. 

  We have come to accept this segmentation of knowledge and even our schooling system is geared towards a segmentation. We get the basic tools we need to learn, and then we apply them to learn some specific things. The tools available for learning have increased in the last decades and they keep increasing to the point that it is becoming impossible to learn all of them. Hundred years ago it was about learning to read and write and little else. Then we learnt the tools of the trade, the specific one in our profession.

    Now young people have to learn how to use the Internet (only very few know how to build the Internet system and we are not teaching them) and have to learn to apply specific tools to extract knowledge from a rapidly growing set of data. Soon they will have to learn how to use augmented reality and virtual reality, how to interact with collaborative robots, and how to balance their knowledge with the one of artefacts. In the meantime, the knowledge half-life (the time it takes for 50% of what they know to lose its value, become useless, or superseded) is shrinking. It is now below 5 years in technology areas (IT knowledge reaches its half-life in less than 2 years!). More than ever in the past knowing how to ask the right question and “whom” to ask becomes crucial. This is happening and effective steps should be taken before it is too late.