## Metadata - Author: [[David Weinberger]] - Full Title: Too Big to Know - Category: #books ## Highlights - John Davis was not an expert in cleaning up oil spills until someone asked a question to which his own off-topic expertise suggested a particularly good answer. That probably would not have happened if there were no Internet and if the Oil Spill Recovery Institute had decided instead to post its challenge in its printed newsletter. Only because the question broke out of its tight circle of experts did John Davis become an expert in moving freezing-cold oil. The Net’s inability to fence in information—its proneness to “information spills”—let the right pieces connect, so a new idea was born. ([Location 1065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1065)) - This transition from expertise modeled on books to expertise modeled on networks is uncomfortable, especially now as we live through the messy transition. We know the value of traditional expertise. We can see a new type emerging that offers different values. From credentialed to uncredentialed. From certitude to ambivalence. From consistency to plenitude. From the opacity conferred by authority to a constant demand for transparency. From contained and knowable to linked and unmasterable. ([Location 1228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1228)) - WE ARE A BUNDLE OF CONTRADICTIONS THESE DAYS. On the one hand, we think it’s important to have our beliefs challenged, preferably at a fundamental level. On the other hand, when the Internet shows us pages and posts that challenge our most basic beliefs, we complain that it’s full of people who believe all sorts of crazy things. On the one hand, we want there to be more serendipity so people won’t stay cocooned within their comfort zones. On the other hand, just about everyone complains that the Internet is too distracting—too filled with serendipity. On the one hand, we celebrate the fact that now there are many voices available to us, not just those of the traditional media. On the other hand, we complain that all these uncredentialed, unreliable people get megaphones as big as those handed to scholars and trained journalists. We have these contradictions because the Net’s riot of ideas is forcing us to face a tension in our strategy of knowledge that the old medium of knowledge papered over. We thought that knowledge thrives in a lively “marketplace of ideas” because the constraints of paper-based knowledge kept most of the competing ideas outside our local market. Now that we can see just how diverse and divergent the ideas around us are—because Internet filters generally do not actually remove material, but only bring preferred material closer—we find ourselves tremendously confused about the value of this new diversity. ([Location 1243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1243)) - Up until this point, I’ve maintained that because the Internet shows us how much there is to know and how deeply we disagree about everything, our old strategy of knowing by reducing what there is to be known—knowledge that is shaped like the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid—is badly adapted to the new ecology. Instead, we are adopting strategies that take advantage of our new medium’s near-infinite capacity. As a result, our basic idea of what knowledge looks like and how it works has been changing. Yet, three of the four tactics for dealing with diversity we just looked at recommend reductive tactics: Get just enough diversity, use a moderator to keep the diversity from getting too great, and fork discussions when they become too diverse. ([Location 1444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1444)) - it’s worth noting that it always seems to be “those other folks” who are being made stupid by the Net. Most of us feel, as we’re Googling around, that the Net is making us smarter—better informed (with more answers at our literal fingertips), better able to explore a topic, better able to find the points of view that explain and contextualize that which we don’t yet understand. ([Location 1505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1505)) - We all know that some of the places where we are smartest work only because they have properties of echo chambers: The clamor of disagreeing voices is muffled or silenced. Knowledge has always needed communities to flourish. Communities need walls so that they can let in the right amount of diversity, even if too frequently they err on the side of homogeneity. But now the Net has made community walls semipermeable. The transparency of the Net lets outsiders look in and insiders look out. And you may be exchanging ideas in a community that Cass Sunstein would call an echo chamber, but you got there by passing through the daily chaotic roil of ideas on the Net. Our old echo chambers were like quiet libraries in quiet communities. Our new echo chambers—knowledge communities—are on the busiest street in the world and there are no windows thick enough to cut out all the noise. ([Location 1519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1519)) - Note: Burning Man is a physical metaphor of this. - Put people on a network and they might form the sort of echo chamber that Cass Sunstein worries about, making themselves more certain, more extreme, and more dangerous as they reconfirm their old opinions with white papers and backslaps. For those who have no interest in intellectual rigor, or who lack curiosity (which, by the way, characterizes each of us for at least part of every day), the Net may well be an environment that degrades knowledge. We need to be concerned about all this. And we need much more research to ascertain the actual risk and actual damage. But the network also offers the possibility of connecting across boundaries, forming expert networks that are smarter than their smartest participants. The network can make us smarter if we want to be smarter. ([Location 1618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1618)) - All men are mortal. Socrates was a man. Therefore, Socrates was mortal. THAT HAS BECOME A STANDARD EXAMPLE of how to know something.1 If the first and second lines of this argument are true, the conclusion can be known with a certainty that even God’s mighty hand could not shake. But of course to know the world, we need much longer chains of argument, for the world is a complex whole. We should be able to start at A and reason our way to Z, in careful, measured steps. This long-form argument is what we’ve taken to be human reasoning at its best. ([Location 1631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1631)) - Welcome to the life of knowledge once it has been taken down from its shelf. It is misquoted, degraded, enhanced, incorporated, passed around through a thousand degrees of misunderstanding, and assimilated to the point of invisibility. It was ever so. Now we can see it happening. When the process of knowing occurs online, in our midst, with a comment section and abundant links to other opinions, it’s no longer possible to separate knowledge-at-work from knowledge-as-itis-understood. ([Location 1905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1905)) - As we have lost faith in objectivity (a process that began before the Net arrived), transparency has begun to do much of the work formerly accomplished by it. Transparency comes in at least two flavors. Transparency about the reporter’s standpoint has been a topic in journalism at least since the “New Journalism” of the 1970s and the “gonzo journalism” practiced by Hunter S. Thompson.27 For example, Jay Rosen’s blog not only takes explicit stands, it has a prominent link to “Q & A about the blog’s POV” that lays out his point of view about journalism and tells us that politically he’s a “standard Upper West Side Liberal Jewish babyboomer.”28 The ease with which readers can look up information about an author can make their standpoints transparent even if they don’t want them to be. The second type of transparency—transparency of sources—is more disruptive of the old system. Paper-based citations are like nails: If you wonder why the author made a particular claim, you can see that it’s nailed down by a footnote. Paper-based citations attempt to keep the reader within the article, while providing the address of where the source material resides for the highly motivated researcher. On the Net, hyperlinks are less nails than invitations. Indeed, many of the links are not to source material but to elaborations, contradictions, and opinions that the author may not fully endorse. They beckon the reader out of the article. ([Location 1955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1955)) - The problem with knowing the role of social media in the recent Mideast revolutions is that the events themselves are the result of a complex cluster of details that defies predictability and complete understanding. The same is true for human events overall, which is why we’re still arguing about whether the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.32 The world is too intertwingly, to use a word coined by network visionary Ted Nelson—too complexly interdependent and entangled to be fully comprehensible.33 The messy web of links that transparency gives rise to reflects that intertwingularity. It should lead us to wonder if one of the problems with objectivity and long-form argument is that they aren’t a good match to the structure of the world. Perhaps intertwingly networks reflect the world more accurately than does an “objective” news report or a walk along a long form’s narrow path. ([Location 1987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=1987)) - It’s hard to tell exactly how much stupider we are as a culture thanks to the Net because the previous media tended to make hard-won truths globally available while keeping ignorance local: What got published generally was what made it through careful, albeit imperfect, filters, whereas the niggling falsehoods flourished outside the broadcast towers. ([Location 2668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00G1SD53O&location=2668))