A new book about knowledge in the Internet age reveals an important lesson about being a good man.
Fans of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a giant supercomputer crunches data for several million years to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything—and comes up only with the cryptic number 42—might find something familiar in the following story:
Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt at Cornell University designed the Eureqa computer program to find equations that make sense of large quantities of data that have stumped mere humans… Dr. Gurol Suel at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center used Eureqa to try to figure out what causes fluctuations among all of the thousands of different elements of a single bacterium. After chewing over the brickyard of data that Suel had given it, Eureqa came out with two equations that expressed constants within the cell. Suel had his answer. He just doesn’t understand it and doesn’t think any person could.
This real life version of Hitchhiker is retold in Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, by David Weinberger (Basic Books, $25.99). Weinberger, who works at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, disagrees with all the other writers who say the internet is making us stupider. Instead he makes the subtler philosophical point that it only seems that way because “knowledge” itself, in the age of the Internet, is fundamentally changing.
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You might wonder what this has to do with men, or being good, or anything else. I’ll get to that in a minute. First a quick and necessary summary of Weinberger’s argument: knowledge is different today because it used to come from books and now comes from the Internet. (Or, “the Net,” as it’s written throughout—though I thought that was a Sandra Bullock movie.)
Book learnin’ gave us knowledge that was more permanent, says Weinberger, because books have a physical presence that the internet lacks; books also gave us knowledge that was more selective, because they’re expensive to produce and publishers don’t want them filled with unnecessary pages or mistakes; and finally, book knowledge was more curated, because writing a well-researched book is hard and requires a certain level of expertise. On the Internet, however, we have limitless space, for free or something near it, and anyone can contribute. As a result, knowledge is no longer a stable thing printed on a page, it’s a constantly evolving aspect of a constantly growing network.
In fact, according to Weinberger, nowadays knowledge is the network, and vice versa. This impressive-sounding but ultimately pretty vague idea, enshrined right there in the title, is what Weinberger returns to again and again. Knowledge equals network. Network equals knowledge. Brave new world, etc.
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This is where the good men stuff comes in. Because, actually, I think Weinberger misses the point a bit: knowledge isn’t suddenly becoming a network; it was always a network. It’s just that the network used to consist entirely of rich old white men, and the reason it seems so much more evident now is that it’s sagging from its efforts to include everyone else.
And part of the reason it’s struggling is that not everybody in the network is willing to be inclusive. I’m not talking about explicit, intentional discrimination, here, though certainly that’s part of it. The bigger problem is the way people unconsciously think about knowledge, or the network, or reality, or whatever you want to call it. Knowledge used to seem stable and efficient because everyone in the network came from the same background, more or less, and unspoken, mutual trust and goodwill abounded. Knowledge worked because everyone felt like they were on the same side. Now it doesn’t, because it’s hard to even pretend that might be true.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be that hard—to pretend we’re on the same side or to actually start being on the same side. Most of the problems with knowledge these days, whether the editing wars on Wikipedia or the disinformation in politics or the underlying unwillingness to accepts others’ points of view, could be avoided if we all stopped and said to ourselves: hey. We’re human beings, right? We share the same planet. We all just want to have happy lives. So aren’t we, actually, on the same side after all?
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That might sound naïve, and I’m not suggesting we blindly trust everyone and everything contributing to the growing network of knowledge—much though those Nigerian bankers who are always emailing me might appreciate it. But if we all stopped worrying about who’s “right” about healthcare, or the economy, or all those other nebulous areas of knowledge, then the real problems would be a lot easier to spot.
In short, if we all stopped trying to win the argument about whether the answer was really 42, we could start being more inclusive in evaluating who has real and valuable insight to offer—to start listening to people with different and challenging viewpoints. And then, finally, together, we could start figuring out the all-important question.
—Photo mlinksva/Flickr
There are certain unfalsiable theories–more accurately unfounded assertions–the questioning of which will get you called all kinds of nasty names.
The medium’s header is encapsulated into the message – a more modern version of “the medium is the message”. And the network has always been there – what differs is the speed and capacity and transmission of information. The hard part has always been transforming information into useful knowledge, and the added speed and capacity don’t help much on that front, to be sure. The “consciousness” of the network will determine true usefulness – ask Google – it’s very sci-fi to imagine and witness an artificial shared consciousness evolving…
I found it pretty funny when these two statements were laid side-by-side: “It’s just that the network used to consist entirely of rich old white men, and the reason it seems so much more evident now is that it’s sagging from its efforts to include everyone else.” and “The bigger problem is the way people unconsciously think about knowledge, or the network, or reality, or whatever you want to call it.” For me, it’s pretty obvious that the first statement is an example of the kind of problem described in the second statement. The entire analysis is built on an… Read more »
Hmm…I think it depends on what sort of knowledge you’re talking about. I agree that there are plenty of areas where knowledge is strictly about facts, and that in many ways that concept is breaking apart. I mean, just look at how politicians can completely scramble the facts of the economy, or their past voting record, or anything and people will eat it up. But not all knowledge is just purely about who is right and who is wrong. Some knowledge is furthered by the interpretation of facts, not just by recognizing them. And in this, I think, having non-experts… Read more »
Anybody should be allowed to speak on any subject at anytime. However, all ideas do not have equal weight as some comport with reality and others do not. An artist may interpret an archaeological find in a new and unique way or come up with some cool new ideas about a finding. But his thoughts would be utterly meaningless without some evidence to back them up and that evidence would also have to have proper standards imposed on it. Same goes for women or African Americans or [insert ethnic group here]. Same goes for everybody everywhere. One may be able… Read more »
Right. That’s pretty much what I was trying to say. Well except…the thoughts put out by a non-expert might not be _completely_ meaningless even if they aren’t backed up by evidence. I mean then they wouldn’t be correct, obviously. But sometimes even the wrong interpretation of something sparks an idea that leads to thinking about it in a different way – and eventually coming up with the right (or at least the most right) interpretation. Like, okay, I just got done reading an article today about my thesis topic in which the authors totally screwed some things up. They jumped… Read more »
Heather, I respect your point of view, but I cannot agree with it. I have a particularly hard time dealing with this subject because I study economics, where the field usually demands that your work be backed by empirical evidence that meets a minimum level of statistical rigor in order to get published. Yet when I attend social science themed conferences, and I am exposed to other fields where this is not the case (indeed, sociologists of the postmodernist school argue that the scientific method itself is a social construct and therefore useless), and I find it nearly impossible to… Read more »
Hmm…I agree with what a lot of what you’re saying…and I’m saying I think the answer to that (or at least part of the answer) is for people who have untested or un-falsifiable theories to recognize that and not try to present them as tested. From my own experience, and from what it sounds like you’re saying, the trouble is when someone not used to having to back their arguments up with facts, suddenly enters a field where they do have to and yet doesn’t recognize this. I dunno, maybe I see that as a solution to the problem because… Read more »
I think this is an intriguing way to look at the internet. Taken to an extreme it could problematic, sure…there are some questions to which there are right and wrong answers. I think the easy access to the internet means we just need to readjust our internal bullsh!t filters a bit before accepting what we see online. We can’t just read something in a book and assume it’s true (though really, we couldn’t exactly do that anyway). But now it’s even more important to consider where that information is coming from. I’m looking at this mostly as an academic, but… Read more »
“It’s just that the network used to consist entirely of rich old white men”
I think it was a lot better when it was mostly just them.
“But if we all stopped worrying about who’s “right” about healthcare, or the economy, or all those other nebulous areas of knowledge, then the real problems would be a lot easier to spot.”
Who is right is of key importance. This seems like its just an argument for more diversity. I do not buy it.
“…if we all stopped worrying about who’s “right” about healthcare, or the economy, or all those other nebulous areas of knowledge, then the real problems would be a lot easier to spot.”
If everyone was talking about something, wouldn’t that be the real problem? (This is everything you think it might be).
Andrew: If we, for example, stopped worrying about who’s right wrt healthcare, we have a problem. It isn’t the argument. It’s what happens when the argument’s winners get real-world stuff happening. And then it might happen to me. So I am interested in who wins. Sure, we’re all human beings. I realize that. This is not an anodyne. For example, some human beings might be out to make a bazillion dollars by collaring, say, the only drug company left after unbribed regulators put the competition out of business. See Gibson Guitars. I have no problem with your point until something… Read more »