facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest

How awfully short sighted of you, puny human.

Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent.

Yeah that's totally meso, who would have thought that that figure would have changed in such a short time span, a mere decade. How silly of me to keep mentioning that 4% at diner parties up to this day.

as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise

Really? How interdisciplinary IS our world? Nobody knows everything about their own field, the breadth of human knowledge is so vast that even mastering a sub-sub-field is becoming a challenge. Do I really care if my cardiac surgeon knows that we've discovered more than 400 exoplanets? I don't even care if he doesn't know how to treat a cold as long as he's the best at open heart surgery.

The worst thing is that I agree with him that it's highly beneficial to regularly update our facts and not to hold too dearly onto them as if they were set in stone, but something in his delivery made me want to piss all over it.