## Metadata - Author: [[Michael P. Lynch]] - Full Title: The Internet of Us - Category: #books ## Highlights - Being reasonable, I’ve said, amounts to defending your views with reasons that are in line with shared epistemic principles or standards. ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=754)) - Our ability to access so much information just makes it easier than ever to follow our hardwired tendencies to make the facts fit what we already think. ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=762)) - Johann Friedrich Zöllner was an eighteenth-century clergyman and political essayist now remembered for being the guy who inspired Kant to define the Enlightenment. ([Location 793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=793)) - Zöllner said that only religion could provide a proper basis for marriage and that religious authorities should be given more weight in civil matters. Enlightenment values, as the progressives called them, weren’t up to snuff. And besides, he sneered in a footnote, no one could ever explain what “enlightenment” meant anyway. A few months later, Kant published a direct answer to Zöllner’s challenge. We encountered it in the first chapter: enlightenment, Kant said, means having the courage to think for yourself. Thus the Kantian bumper sticker: Sapere aude; dare to know. Kant’s concern was partly with intellectual autonomy. But he also points out that we are beings that can think for ourselves, and so in our role as citizens we owe it to one another to explain ourselves in ways that respect that fact. That’s because, Kant says, when I give you reasons I treat you as someone who is free to make up your own mind. I treat you with dignity. I treat you as a grownup. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=796)) - Kant’s point helps to mitigate the force of the ancient skeptical argument even if it doesn’t answer it directly. The skeptical argument says, in effect, that we can’t defend fundamental scientific methods as any more rational than other methods. What Kant points out, however, is that we can show that they are more democratic, more respectful of basic human autonomy. Why? Because scientific methods use human cognitive capacities such as observation and inference. That doesn’t mean these capacities are always reliable, or even that we are very skilled at using them (news flash: we aren’t). But human capacities like these—capacities that are at the very basis of science—-do have an obvious virtue for a digitalized society: they aren’t secret or the province of a few. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=806)) - Prioritizing scientific methods is liberating precisely because it frees one from appeals to authority, from the thought that something is true because someone in power says so. The Internet has created an explosion of what I called in the last chapter receptive knowledge. We saw there that while this is wonderful in many respects, it isn’t enough; we need to exchange reasons and play by shared epistemic rules if we are going to solve the information coordination problem that faces all societies. But Kant reminds us that reasonableness defined in this way also has serious political and democratic value. ([Location 813](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=813)) - We need to privilege “scientific” epistemic principles and methods of thinking in public discourse precisely because such principles allow us to evaluate authority. What makes scientific methods of rationality important is that without them you can’t hope to have anything like an open society. ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=836)) - Note: is this statement true? dougald hine might differ. are there other ways of having an open society? - The philosopher Richard Rorty famously declared that, “if you take care of freedom, truth will take of itself.” His idea, which he found in the educator and philosopher John Dewey, was that we can’t hope to ground our political principles on our scientific or epistemic principles. We can’t hope for a “foundationalist” view that places science on the bottom, holding up democracy. That’s because sometimes it goes the other way around: we have to ground our fundamental epistemic principles on our democratic values. But that doesn’t mean we should put politics first, science and epistemology second. Foundationalism turned on its head is still foundationalism. The right lesson to draw is one Kant would have thought obvious: our political and intellectual values are intertwined. The hard part isn’t seeing this fact; it is in trying to make sense of how we should improve our values— epistemic, intellectual and political—making sure that truth and freedom take care of each other. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=839)) - We need to view one another (at least some of the time) as autonomous thinkers—as persons who can make up their own mind and have the right to do so. Give up on that and you give up on a central element of what Dewey would have called the public life: a common currency of principles and reasons that we can use to sort information and disputes over that information. ([Location 847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=847)) - The connection between a loss of privacy and dehumanization is a well-known and ancient fact, and one which we don’t need to appeal to science fiction to illustrate. It is employed the world over in every prison and detention camp. It is at the root of interrogation techniques that begin by stripping people literally and figuratively of everything they own. ([Location 1318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1318)) - Surveillance treats us as means, not as ends. And that is another reason the incidental collection of our data should worry us. A government that sees its citizens’ private information as subject to tracking and collection has implicitly adopted a stance toward those citizens inconsistent with the respect due to their inherent dignity as autonomous individuals. It has begun to see them not as persons but as objects to be understood and controlled. That attitude is inconsistent with the demands of democracy itself. ([Location 1347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1347)) - Actually, suspicion of the foundationalist picture of the structure of justification is hardly new. The logical positivist Otto Neurath—a member of the famous Vienna Circle gathering of intellectuals in the early twentieth century—famously suggested another metaphor. He likened justifying our beliefs to rebuilding a raft at sea. If we are to work on one of the planks, we must stand on another. If we later need to repair that second plank, then we must go back to standing on the first. We can’t repair all the planks on a boat at sea at the same time. In other words, when we support our beliefs about one kind of thing, we take other beliefs for granted as justified. But we might later throw those into question, and take the first ones for granted. There is no point outside of the raft—outside our framework of beliefs—on which to stand. ([Location 1592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1592)) - Webs, fabrics, interlocking planks of a raft and wikis are all networks, but they are not networks with foundational nodes; the nodes are where the individual lines and threads cross. And that, of course, is the point. Our beliefs are nodes in a network, supported by the overall coherence of the fabric of beliefs to which they belong. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1605)) - Crowdsourcing is really a type of outsourcing. And outsourcing knowledge production is as profitable as outsourcing anything else. It is simply a mistake to think that such outsourcing is making knowledge production more democratic. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case: outsourced knowledge producers such as crowd workers are professionals without the protection of a profession—without, in short, basic labor rights. Crowd workers don’t own what they produce. ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1748)) - The history of racism in this country and many others is replete with examples of people being excluded from not only the monetary economy but the epistemic economy. In 1854, for example, the California Supreme Court infamously ruled that it was perfectly legal that “no Black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against a white man.” In writing the opinion, Chief Justice Charles J. Murray pointed to what he thought was a slippery slope: The same rule which would admit them to testify, would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls. This is not a speculation . . . but an actual and present danger.”11 ([Location 1810](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B010C3Q3ZU&location=1810))