Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Information

(The conversation with my wife went on.)

"Since you mention reading a lot without any practical experience, I come to realize medical students are very fortunate nowadays." Vivian said, "In the old days, when we encountered a particular disease or specific drug in the ward and we wanted to look it up, we had to search through several textbooks, and, many a time, we still could not get a satisfactory answer. Now, a student just goes to the Internet and key in anything you need, you can get a very detail answer - in Medscape or Wikipedia or whatever. In short, they have all the information at their fingertips."

"My dear, I'm not sure you could call that fortunate. Maybe I can explain my concern in a philosophical way: You read a lot of martial arts novels (武俠小說), don't you?"

"Yes... so what?"

“咁你有幾何見絕世高手係住喺藏經閣㗎?”

Or, as TS Eliot said:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?

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