Good evening everyone. I love the natural silence that befell the room clearly indicating the six o'clock and time to hear from David Weinberger I am not David Weinberger. I'm John Palfrey. I wish I were after reading this book I wish I could at least write like David Weinberger. Wow But on behalf of the Harvard Law School the Harvard Law School library the Harvard library And lots of others the Berkman Center in particular are shared intellectual home here Welcome to the book talk for David's amazing new book too big to know We have a wonderful lineup This evening not just David, but a few friends Experts who will be responding in particular earlier this year My previous favorite book was too much to know by Ann Blair professor of history here and Professor Blair will be one of the three respondents One of the many wonderful things about David is not only has it been a fellow of the Berkman Center and an author and Philosophers you may know and a co-teacher of mine here at Harvard Law School someone who's accomplished a great deal He's also been working in the Harvard libraries to help us think about and build innovative things He's the co-director with Kim Doolin who I saw earlier of the library innovation lab here And so he's working within the system of libraries to affect much of the positive change that he describes in his work Everything is miscellaneous as well as this book here and Representing the Harvard library the senior associate provost Mary Lee Kennedy is also one of the respondents which is exciting so ultimately our Colleague in the system and last we will hear Also, it only lasts because it's his last name starts with a Z Ethan Zuckerman always gets to go last unless it gets flipped on its head Long-time friend and colleague extraordinary writer and scholar in his own right Who's recently left the Berkman Center to be head of the Center for Civic Media at MIT at the MIT Media Lab Ethan? We welcome you back. This isn't it really back, but we're thrilled that you're here So thank you all for coming to this event and we're excited to hear from everyone. We'll also have time as David advertises the expert Expertise is not all in him. I think is part of the point here all of you have the expertise There'll be time to hear from all of you. I hope with questions and discussion after the respondents I have a bunch of little things which I will note David will not want me to say this, but I will anyway Please buy the book and it's available for sale back here My guess is that there even maybe some other Meinberger titles available if they're not here get them from Kindle anyway, but too big to know is available This is being recorded, but not webcast. So if you speak you will be You are now forewarned that you will be recorded for posterity and shared out, but you will not be immediately noted We will end last question around 715 ish something like that followed by which there's a reception out in the rotunda I hope you will stay around There is a hashtag for those who would like to tweet and we encourage you to do that which is 2b2k David Do you approve? I approve. All right. That's good. That's good It's an approved hashtag now that ordinarily would have a pound in front of it for those who are tweeting And last and I think this is kind of fun David said he will sign things afterwards We said what will you sign and he said of course books, but he actually said I'll sign anything you want So if you have baseballs footballs your shirt, whatever it might be David Meinberger will sign it for you David Thank you for being such a great colleague and for being willing to introduce your book to us here Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much Thank you so much for coming out Thank you the Berkman Center for hosting this and the library system for being one of the world's great library systems and I'll sign almost anything. I would need to put Don't want to be tested on that so If you look at the at the bastions of knowledge the things that they're very emblems of knowledge in our culture physical emblems Bulwarks of knowledge things that you put up because you're proud to be a knower things like Encyclopedias they're they're all just sort of coming apart It's it's quite astounding in the past 15 years with newspapers, which a proud sign of our commitment our cultural commitment to knowledge They're being Reaggregated disaggregated on attic aggregated Nobody knows what their future is going to be Libraries you ask any librarian and and he or she will tell you We know it's going to be different. We don't know what it is This these are physical public libraries, for example, which generally look like Greek temples that they're a marker in a town of that town's Love of knowledge and we don't know what's going to be happening to them either. This is actually pretty astounding that these very Symbols of and manifestations of knowledge are now in play at risk We don't they're falling over and all that it took was a touch of a little hyperlink this little bit of technology Which of course embedded in much bigger technology, but a hyperlink just sort of touched these massive institutions Multi-generational hundred centuries of old and they sort of fell apart We don't know what's going to happen to them and so that's the question I want to ask why did these institutions of knowledge fall apart so quickly and of course I cannot answer that question I'm going to take one sort of odd path through the territory But it's I think it's an important question to ask in any case because knowledge in our culture and I'm only talking about throughout this entire thing I'm only talking about Western knowledge. That's it Knowledge has made a promise to us which is expressed in this this now famous senator Moynihan quote. They're wonderful quote It's everyone is entitled to his own opinion not his own facts Well this we hear and it brings a certain amount of comfort to us and it makes a promise and the comfort is well You know if we all just focus get together have a good honest conversation We can all come to agreement Knowledge has made that promise to us in the West from the beginning Restated in the Enlightenment that knowledge is the thing that will bring us together There's only one knowledge We don't have a plural for it and that's what ultimately will get over our differences So just a very quick reminder of what knowledge has been in our culture We have assumed we have thought that knowledge is some type of picture of our world that we build up Bit by bit back by fact idea by idea until and they all the pieces fit together Right, so we're and we're doing this across generations It's a noble pursuit and each of these pieces is nailed down and yes This is the third metaphor out of three slides about one more coming up so each of these is nailed down with a certainty it's settled and Finally we have assumed from the beginning that knowledge is a matter of filtering It's a product of filtering of winnowing First from the stream of perception which are the true perceptions and then in the mob of opinion Which are the true beliefs the opinions being expressed out in the marketplace originally 2,500 years ago So from the beginning knowledge has been about filtering and winnowing finding what is the gold in this flux So we've done this especially the filtering idea for a good reason We've had to devise strategies based upon an undeniable fact Which is the world is way way way way way bigger than our skulls and skulls don't scale And as we learn more and more as there's more and more knowledge our skulls don't get any bigger So it's a problem. Just gets worse and worse. We've known from the beginning. There's just too much stuff There's too much to know if I may quote professor Blair and the world is too big to know and Thus both titles come together So we have these very small skulls. It's a real issue And so we've had a strategy that we've been following for about the past 2,500 years Which is to break off a brain-sized chunk of the world and to enable an expert to know it deeply and well And this is this is truly a noble thing and Rather at a university where actually at a very excellent university and we know experts and There's nothing as awesome as as an expert, but this basic strategy has been too much Yeah, okay, then know this really deeply know it really really well And then we can go to these experts or read their books and we can ask questions and we can get an answer The important thing about this is that we can then stop asking The system of knowledge that we've built in response to the basic fact that are that the world is is just too Gigantic for us has been to construct the system of knowledge That is a system of stopping points and that's where the efficiency of this system is this brilliant system This has made us the dominant species on the planet. So this really really works But it is a system of stopping points you ask the question and you do not have to go on you do not have to You got your answer you don't have to rerun the experiment redo the research And if you don't trust the expert we have a backup system, which is a system of credentials say well Hmm, are you sure because I don't and then you look on the wall You say oh, I say you got a degree from wherever and that credential serves as a second system of stopping points Hugely amazingly efficient system for building knowledge and moving on We should not think however that that's how knowledge itself is That's how knowledge works when its medium is paper Paper for all of its glory books for all of its of its glory Look at professor Darden for a moment Books for all of their magnificence Nevertheless are a disconnected medium It's not what they're good the one thing They're not good at is connecting to other books because they're stuck between covers and their shelves apart And this basic fact about books has determined much of how what we how we put together knowledge and what we think it is The author has to try to get everything About the topic between those covers because the author understands the readers can't just click and pop out and get the information that's being referenced you pull in a quote you pull in a Summary of another work because you know the reader can't get out of the book You have to devise a book so it starts in a and goes through because it has pages it goes through all those pages and sequence and brings the reader to Z to a conclusion and Because books are really quite small even big books are really quite small compared to what there is to know in the world Or for any particular topic you have to exercise a certain ruthlessness which we call good writing in order to Figure out what needs to be in the book and what can be cast aside? What needs not be in the book because you don't want to distract the reader from from this tour that you're taking her him on And so we have devised we have thought about knowledge as a type of long-form argument for example Well, you know books match these characteristics of traditional characteristics of knowledge pretty well it a book is some type of picture of some aspect of the world and it is of course highly filtered both because few books get published and because Even within the work you have to reduce what you're going to be talking about to keep it within the covers and Books are printed and settled therefore once they're printed. They're very hard. It's very hard to get the ink off the pages Once it's been published. It's you don't publish till you have settled things books are a way of settling and they they go together As a set as a library the knowledge is in libraries not just in books, of course but books also generally want to move you along this path step by step brick by brick through deduction or by Providing evidence along each step so that you take each step carefully And you bring your reader along step by step now the next step and you get to the end and when it works It's it is magnificent. It is a magnificent and very human Accomplishment but that's how knowledge looks when it's medium is paper now. Obviously. We have a new medium you can think about Links as being a new type of punctuation the old type of punctuation tells you how to stop tells you where to stop the new punctuation Tells you how to continue and gives you the means of continuing in fact the means of continuing is the smallest possible human motion We're to ask you what is the smallest possible human motion? You might raise one eyebrow which doesn't yet work for changing pages or you might go like that Move your finger so little that you can't even see me doing it And that's all that you need now in order to do what you used to have to do When you wanted to follow a footnote in a book you used to have to get on the bus and go Downtown find a big library crawl through the shelves and hope that the book is there which it probably isn't That's why you don't follow footnotes. It's very rare for somebody instead. We use footnotes as a stopping point They tell us I see that's why the the author said this questionable thing There is a reason why but actually following the foot the footnotes even if you're a scholar Relatively rare because it's a very expensive thing to do now That much and you have followed the footnote It's the magic map that we we've dreamt about that not only shows you the world, but you touch it and you go there So this is a different environment. It's an environment that is all about connection and in this environment in this new medium Knowledge I believe is picking up the properties of the new medium just as it picked up properties of the old medium I want to look just for tonight Properties of the internet characteristics of the internet that I think are also now showing up as characteristics of knowledge for better And for worse I should I'm pretty optimistic about this but It's also There's lots to worry about and at the end I want to come back to the impossibly large question I pose at the beginning and fail to answer it for you. You're welcome So the first is that there's first characteristic of the internet that knowledge is taking on is the recognition There is just too much. There is so much Clay Scherke Of whom many of us are great admirers. I certainly am Put this with his typical brilliance Recently, there's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure and what he means I believe is We he's trying to provide some some comfort some historical continuity and comfort to say well, you know We don't freak out about this information overload thing. We constantly in our history We've had periods where we felt this and it's really just a matter of adjusting our filters And there's another scholar who has done some extraordinary work in this field in a book called too much to know it Professor Blair and Blair who shows This in extraordinary detail and and great narrative flow actually so Yes, this is something that the world has always been too big for us to know we go through periods of Terrible fear because our filters are broken that continuity is important But I want to point to two discontinuities as well in the current age And the first is about how much there is so this is Alvin toffler who popularized the phrase information overload in Future shock in 1970 He didn't invent it. He points out that it was in fact invented as a Follow-on to a term that arose in the early 1950s sensory overload and the idea there was that If you're at a concert and there's too much noise and smells and touch and all the rest of it Your sensory circuits can get overloaded and you will fall down as a quivering mass unable to respond Sensory overload and once we decided for Lord knows what reasons that brains are in fact information processors I Guess I won't get started don't even get me started once we decided that once information took over the world Then we said huh same thing happens when there's too much information We must have this thing called information overload with the same sort of effect of falling over quivering and Toffler says Sanity hangs upon avoiding information overload Okay, so very scary people are very worried about it just as in the 60s They were worried about sensory overload because that term was used mainly in context to to scare parents about their children's drug use 1970s information overload and we're all getting worried about that so what an information overload look in the 1970s look like in the 1970s Well, there's a market a study done by some marketers to gauge this in 1974 and so they gathered 192 housewives and showed them 16 brands of consumer item and each of which had 16 categories of Consumer information and those categories were greatly reduced. So it wasn't even 120 calories it was high or low calories So it was already a reduced set and they discovered these marketers that this much information Degraded the poor housewives ability to make make good decisions And so the marketers concluded that therefore they are doing their customers a service by withholding Information and that's what they did Nevertheless when we look at this if I were to ask you what information overload is there is an article today that in two years There will be an exabyte Not a terabyte not a petabyte an exabyte of genomic information Within one one field one category an exabyte of information That's what you think about when these days when we think about that's what gets to say gets us to say wow That's a lot of information We look at this we don't say oh, man. I that's too confusing. I can't deal with that Well, somebody reduce it to 12 because my cognitive functions are going down. It's not what we think information overload is What constitutes information overload has changed and that's a discontinuity from from the past another discontinuity the second one I want to point to is The nature of filters so in the real world when we filter something we divide it into two piles And we get rid of this the dregs the stuff we are filtering out so we filter out people don't see the dregs So if you are on the acquisitions committee for your local library, you'll make some good decisions about which books You put them on the new bookshelf people will come in they'll be very happy. What a good choice So what they won't see are the million books published last year that you did not accept They will not see them piled high in trucks Draped in black that are silently pulling away mournfully from the loading dock as you deprive your library users of access to those works. They will not see that because that's how Filters work in the real world. We see what's there. We remove what's not it's not how filters work digitally So if you do the equivalent sort of activity, which is let's say to pick Your blogging and it's going to be the ten best Business posts of the week or whatever doesn't matter and so you list them and you talk about them on your site in filtering them You haven't removed anything at all you haven't separated anything at all except that you've reduced the number of clicks That it takes to get to those ten books just takes one click now before it would have taken somebody two three four five clicks Whatever all of the rest of the hundreds of thousands of business articles published posted that day on the web They're all still available. They're all still there in a way that the Manuscripts in the old days the paper manuscripts that got sent into the publishers of the publisher rejected Those are not available. You you don't know that they're there And if you did you'd have to find the the author and hunter down and get her to give you a copy probably on carbon paper You know a carbon copy of the papers that stuff is inaccessible all the rest of the stuff you did not filter forward On online it's all there and may show up in somebody else's blog post may show up in another search result or In passed around an emailing list or whatever. It's all still there So we filter forward on the web We don't filter out and we are constantly reminded of this because the search engines have an economic interest in Reminding us of how much stuff they are not showing us And so we are constantly having it put in our face in many different ways that there is so much stuff there And it is all accessible if it's in this list if it's on the web you can get to it one way or another Maybe hard to find but you can get there and so we're seeing a different sort of strategy emerge from the old one Which was to curate now curation is still an important wonderful incredibly valuable thing Nevertheless, there's a another strategy that is being used prior to curation that enables curation Which is to include everything the economics of deletion of change So that the cost of deleting something frequently is much higher than the cost of keeping it Which is why on your hard drives if you're like the rest of us you have? thousands of images from your cameras label DSC 1099733 dot DS dot jpeg because it's too hard. It's too expensive to go through and delete them that that takes time Inclusion is often cheaper and there's a good reason to include everything I'll put everything in quotes because you don't really include but nevertheless to be very generous in what you include and the reason is that when you Exclude when you when you curate even when you curate you're making decisions about what things will be interesting to your users And nobody can predict what every user's interest is going to be For two reason the first is we're we're we are really squirrely And we you can't know what other people are going to be interested in if you try you'll always be wrong So if you curated this list, let's say it's of news reports and you took out of it reasonably all of the schlocky Gossipy stuff about Lizzie Lohan and Britney Spears and the rest of it you would then have deprived these very serious academics of the research material the raw material They need to do their research on the medias treatment of women celebrities You didn't think it was interesting But you were wrong and you cannot predict what's going to be interesting to people and the second thing that you You can't predict is history So in this news collection if you're putting it together this year Excuse me a few years ago. You probably would not have included the meetings from the library committee from 1996 in Wasilla, Alaska Because you could not predict 2008 those meeting notes would actually turn out to be interesting We don't know and now that we can it's so cheap to include We don't have to try to anticipate quite as much But if you do that you now have a big stinking mess that you're presenting to your users And you need to give them very powerful tools for filtering on the way out Filtering of the way that they think about the world not the way that you think about it And you can read much of the history of the web as the rapid development of tools for doing exactly that Incredibly powerful tools for end users to use To find within gigantic masses of data exactly what they what they want something that in the night early 1990s information retrieval experts were told would have told us Ordinary users could not possibly do what we now take for granted. I am not going to go through these tools I am going to tip my hat to one that I particularly like which comes out of the library innovation lab Which is called shelf life and which provides a visual way of browsing through the 12 million Works in the Harvard library all 73 collections in a way that is highly dynamic and Good tool for Anyway, so we're really proud of this in the lab so the next characteristic of The net that I think knowledge is taking up isn't the met the net is really really messy it is there's as you know No organizing principle Which is disturbing to us and frequently because we really like order and we're very very very good at this point at establishing order We're really good at it and not simply Excuse me not simply so that we can Find things which would be certainly enough of a reason But because we thought that there was epistemological ontological value in it We thought we were actually getting at how the world is and so to know something for thousands of years in our culture Was to know it's its place in the universe its spot in the universal order in the order of things and most traditionally and typically coming out of Aristotle the order which is a thing of beauty Everything has one spot it has its right spot and the person who knows what that thing is knows what that spot is and the Spot is one that's defined by its essence or definition Which shows the principle by which it's clustered with other things in its category and the principles of difference that this distinguishes it Knowing this was to know the world not knowing this was to not know the world to say that there was no order was to say that Chaos reigns and God is dead. This was a really serious pursuit for thousands and thousands of years and one of the reasons To that this has arisen that's his pursuit arisen arose is that it works perfectly well It's the right about how you organize things in the real world So if you are organizing your physical CDs if any of you remember what those are and you and your spouse has a different Idea about how to organize them one of you at most is going to win You can't or if you want to do it by alphabet and your spouse wants to do it by genre You cannot do both because they're physical objects physical objects have to have a place No, two things to be the same spot at the same time You have to come up with an order and so you have arguments about whether Philly wacko here really belongs in acid visionaries and weirdos or really belongs in British psych It's not really that interesting an argument to have but we've been having this argument for a long time because we had to and we have made the Really serious and interesting error of thinking that the organization of ideas Has to suffer from the same limitations of as the organization organization of things has to be one one place The things go one way of ordering now, of course You would not have this argument with your spouse if it was digital content of digital Tracks who just make playlists you make two playlists You'd make a hundred playlists as many as you want joining the billions of playlists on the planet Each one adds a little bit of value because they say oh here's an interesting way of clustering Here's a print a principle of organization that contradicts all the other principles of organization, but doesn't matter Collectively it is a mess, but it is a rich rich mess So that now when we think about the order of the universe this was so not all Finding where things go in the order was not only The project of knowing it was the essential project of being human because humans were Construed as from the Greeks on as being the knowers That was what that was the fulfillment of our essence These may these may be feathered bipeds, but we're the rational animals And so this was a really serious business, but now it's just seems silly to argue about what the order is When we have so many multiple layers we have playlists we have tags We have multiple ways of curating and categorizing and they all add value because it turns out that messy Messiness is in fact how you scale meaning next characteristic is the Internet is wildly unsettled And so I think that's happening to knowledge as well, which is both a good thing and a bad thing So what I mean by unsettled is that for every fact on the internet there is an equal and opposite fact There is nothing that we all agree on I mean that almost literally That whatever the fact is including two plus two equals four you will find somebody who perhaps not seriously But perhaps quite seriously disagrees We may want to make exceptions for axiomatic systems. I don't care there is the the internet is a stew of disagreement and Anybody who goes on the internet just about I want to avoid the techno determinism of saying that the technology itself causes this Nevertheless within our culture within multiple cultures you go on the internet you learn some things and one of the things that you learn the internet is at all open is that We don't agree. We don't agree about Anything and we never will and my evidence for never will is all of human history We are not going to agree about anything and this is actually quite a secret. I'm not saying that all facts are equal And there's no truth. I'm not saying that at all. I fully believe I like facts I wish we had more and we based more policies on them. I'm not saying there are no facts What I'm saying is we're not gonna agree about them People are going to insist on being wrong. We're so the promise of knowledge that's been held out to us Isn't working. It's not that promise is broken. We are not going to it Maybe we should but we're not going to agree and the ironic and sort of sad fact is that we don't even know if Moynihan said this and if he did what his exact words were that's not even a fact So this is this is should be cause for some concern. I would say But not Fatal concern it's something we need to be working on but we have been we've been rapidly evolving just as we've been rapidly evolving New ways of filtering that end users can use that information retrieval specialist 15 20 years ago would have said were impossible Never be able to filter that much and you'll have to have an advanced degree at IR and who's gonna they're wrong about that Likewise, we've been rapidly developing ways of dealing with difference and disagreement So I want to give you a couple of examples. They're all familiar to you And the first this is actually a terrible example, but you'll see why use it This is YouTube. This is the new Batman trailer YouTube is famous for having a really crummy Conversational system the commenting system is it is very hard to go back and forth So this is last week on this lots of comments on this and there were about 30 that were about Circumcision the medical benefits or lack thereof of circumcision in the middle of the Batman thing I had nothing to do with Batman It was some comment of somebody said something about use the word Jew and suddenly they're off on a circumcision argument And it was actually fairly learned it was two people going back and forth got sort of nasty so If YouTube were a better conversational system What would have happened is that you somebody would have said well basically Just get a room. Well, you just fork it fork the conversation We don't want to stop the conversation because it's you two are obviously interested in maybe other people are as well So go off on your own thread, but let us continue talking about the new Batman movie Forking is a really powerful way of dealing with difference and disagreement We take it for granted but it's very hard to do in the real world if you have six people at a dinner table and two of them Suddenly start arguing about circumcision nobody else cares about it's very hard to say Why don't you go to get another over that table for a little while and talk you basically have to shut them off And you don't have to do that on the web. So that's one way of dealing with difference Another is this so in the 1900s excuse me 1800s 19th century We had a very long heated argument about how to classify this animal because it was a mammal Basically that laid eggs and people couldn't figure out what category and further more maybe it shouldn't be in any category It should it has to be a hoax because there can't be something that violates even when scientists were shown a dead one brought from Tasmania with eggs in it they concluded it was a hoax because it couldn't couldn't possibly be so We have this creature We have a history of not being sure what it is and now we just sort of don't care all that much It seems like sort of a waste of breath to argue about whether the platypus So we do this other thing and encyclopedia of life you can see this being done really brilliantly We have namespaces that is a domain in which objects have unique names which are different perhaps from the names in another namespace and Computers can match them so it encyclopedia of life every species every organism gets its own page It has two databases one is of nomenclature of names So whatever your scientist or whatever you want to look this thing up use whatever name makes you happy even even colloquial names Various scientific just great who cares and if you insist that it has to be classified using this taxonomy as opposed to that one There are multiple scientific taxonomies fine. You specify it They've got a database of them and it will show you this creature using your name and your preferred taxonomy great get on with your lives and If two scientists want to collaborate about this thing They don't have to have the argument anymore about what it is because they each have their own Different namespace namespaces are a brilliant way of dealing with difference that allows us still to move forward and even to collaborate So the internet is made up of all of these differences every link expresses a difference The value of the internet comes from this difference and disagreements. Oh, yeah for difference. Yeah It's wonderful. It is that's where all diversity all all innovation and comes from all True and real thought comes from these differences and disagreements and we've known this for a long time So yay for difference But even though the internet looks a bit like this so many different types of people and different ideas The internet as we live in it looks a lot more like this Not necessarily in terms of race and gender and ethnicity But in terms of ideas because we like to hang out with people with whom we agree Some people call this Homophily yes, I'm looking at you either many people call it homophily and it is a very serious issue because there is some evidence the echo chamber argument that if you Hang out with people with whom you you agree that your beliefs get solidified and not only that so you become less open but not only that you become more extreme in your beliefs and so the culture becomes more Polarized and that's exactly the opposite of what? Internet utopians sort of like me. We're hoping for this is a real and serious concern It's very hard to know exact and we ought to take it Seriously and act against it individually institutionally with our children the educational system because we do seem to have this natural human Desire comfort to stay with that which is familiar to us Nevertheless there are important serious questions about this questions that make this entire formulation to me seem Something's wrong with the way this question is being posed I think it has something to do with the assumption that real cover and this is this assumption comes from the Enlightenment that It's not before that real conversations are conversations among people who disagree deeply and who are able to dig down and get to that Fundamental factual level that Moynihan promises us and any conversation other than that is not a real conversation It's just making small talk and what that misses is the social role of conversation It misses the fact that we have to have so much to have a really great conversation in which minds are changed and opened We have to agree so much. There is so much. We have to agree upon. We have to speak the same language We have to be interested in the same topic to talk about it. We have to have some basic set of of Common facts and values. We have to have the same norms for conversation There in order to have a good conversation. We have to have 99 percent similarity and 1 percent difference It's got to be the right percent difference. I made up the numbers entirely. They have no actual meaning Okay, but a huge amount of similarity and so I'm not going to pursue this question I don't know how to pursue it But there are people who have done magnificent jobs raising questions about it if only we could identify them So certainly Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler have been Magnificent in this discussion And Ethan we're all looking forward to your book Okay, next characteristic and Last which is gonna take me unfortunately a little bit Is that the internet is unstructured and by that I mean you know our idea of knowledge Property that knowledge is taking on so our old idea of knowledge is that it has a basic structure The pieces go together We're like a jigsaw puzzle or bricks and furthermore that this type of long-form argument where we start With some premises and we walk carefully and slowly to get to the conclusion that preferably surprises or opens the eyes of The reader takes the reader someplace that she was not expecting to go a belief. She would not otherwise have had this is a magnificent form of thought We don't know of any other creature that is able to do this and yet There there's a lot to be said about this. I'm gonna say only a little I think that and this is something we may want to talk about that long-form argument sort of book length argument And yes, I did write a book. I got the irony fine That long-form argument is losing its preeminence as the way the highest the pinnacle of human knowing of human thought is to see Into God's deductive mind that God sees the world as a sequence of Events and ideas and insofar as we can capture that in our own humble way. We are in our creator's image That idea of knowledge is losing its preeminence. It's not going away It will always be a valuable way of thinking but it's losing its preeminence So if you are Darwin who wrote one of the truly successful magnificent long-form works One that did convince people of something that had not expected to believe If he were writing now he well might write that same work But it would be on the web it would be posted on the web if it weren't posted on the web It would be discussed on the web That's where the discussion would be and one hopes in fact that he would be blogging along the way that he would be Tweeting from the Beagle his findings on the Beagle and people would be chiming in and saying something funny about those Beaks of those how do you explain that and the conversation would have started and he would have Encountered people who object to add to subtract to get it wrong get it right apply it to new fields in ways that are Brilliant or or dumb To commercial would have become commercially interesting to travel agents who are booking tours to the clock of those that this web Which includes Darwin's original long-form work has more value than the work itself that this is where the thinking happens This is where the knowledge lives you want to understand Darwin in the 21st century the 21st century Darwin you will have to See not just her or his work We're gonna have to see the web that it inspires and if you want a real example of this and I am here going to channel Michael Nielsen whose book Reinventing Discovery is really really good. He was at the Berkman Center a few weeks ago and gave this example So the fast token light neutrino findings and data that came in that threatens to overthrow relativity theory And if you wanted to ask any questions about that I am at the end of my knowledge nevertheless given at that So the findings come in to get posted at archive.org which is a pre print site Any scientist can post whatever she and she wants there. They post it there immediately it stirs up a firestorm of interest and people from all over the world. They're posting 80 Papers are posted in response at archive, but it spills out into the blogs and the mainstream media the Minor stream media everywhere people explaining their own theories their own evidence some of which are Brilliant some of which is stupid and wrong explanations at every level of the stack Explanations for experts all the way down to people who don't know relativity theory and don't have the math at all Which would be me this whole ecology of knowledge This one paper spawned an ecology of knowledge knowledge that was that filled just about every niche This is where the knowledge was developed This is where the knowledge lives And if you even once this question is settled about whether neutrinos do in fact go faster than light if you want to Understand this issue you're gonna have to go on to this web And you'll never traverse this entire web because this entire web is by itself too big for any one person Nevertheless, this is where knowledge is it is not contained in the book all of this was done outside of peer review outside of printed peer-reviewed journals That's where knowledge is it's at the level of the internet But this light this this destructuring of knowledge. I think is happening not just At that level it's also happening at the level of the facts of the data themselves. So Darwin 1846 for the next seven years Studied barnacles Before he got around to publishing this when he was in his postponement phase He studied barnacles he dissected them to discover if they were mollusks as Linnaeus had thought or whether they were whether they're crustaceans seven years Little dissecting instruments coming to dinner smelling of formaldehyde every night and dead seafood nice combo for the kids So he finally he worked it out published big to two volume work on the topic settled that hash That's what facts were like in the 19th century. They were there were acts of discovering them were acts of nobility So hard so rare to find Not like that quite anymore so those are barnacles sorry We're seeing the same sort of destructuring happening at the level of facts and so we're seeing in field after field after field We're seeing clouds of data. We're seeing a data commons emerge with clouds and clouds of massive amounts of data Whether it's in genetics or astronomy or government data or libraries have been jumping onto this onto these clouds as well These data clouds are fundamentally different than Then facts in a few ways, so which I'll point you very quickly the first is that for example at data.gov which is President Obama's very first act was to Call for openness of data. This is one of the results Data from federal agencies are supposed to be made public quickly and so data.gov, which is the site that was established Announces that it's providing to us to the world raw data uncleaned up unnormalized some of it can be wrong or misleading Because even though everybody would prefer perfectly clean normalized standardized data, of course It doesn't scale you won't get it We'll take the agencies 20 years before they are able to go through this massive amount of data So it's better than decision was made and this is quite typical in the clouds space these days Better to have raw data that may have inconsistencies and may be wrong in some some ways than to wait if you want to scale up You got to get the data in raw in raw form and be happy with it That's not what Darwin would have said Darwin spent seven years on one fact But it turns out there is tremendous value in in getting all of this data out. That's how you scale data likewise There's tremendous value in getting our information out quickly in the form of articles. This is archive.org again That are outside the peer review system because peer review doesn't scale the wonderful things about peer review There's some well-known problems it can it can Put it can keep in power a small elite this etc. Oh, that's true But there are wonderful things about peer review But it one thing that is is bad about it does not scale you cannot scale science quickly enough You cannot scale research quickly enough through peer review Unless perhaps it's a type of peer-to-peer peer review, which we also see emerging We the evidence of this is in the the dual growth of in the open access field of Both journals open access online free journals that are peer reviewed because there is tremendous value in that They're just not eliminating rejecting stuff because the topic is too small if it's good science Then it'll go get into the peer reviewed open access journal But there's also open access repositories which are generally not peer reviewed and there's value in that as well There's value in both, but if you want to scale, that's how you have to do it The third way that data is changing from facts is that it's linked and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this But so I'm gonna try to do it as quickly as I can if it's not clear then I apologize ahead of time But this is linked data linked data is a format that is recommended by Tim Berners-Lee Who you may remember gave us the web for free that copyright or patent In the link data these clouds are consistent data that has three parts that draws a relationship between two things That's they're called triples So good so that's interesting But the really crucial part is that it if you're a computer and you want to start making sense of these clouds because these clouds are too Big for the cranium. You've got to use computer power on them You want to make sense of them you may not you won't know that the platypus is the same thing as a water mole Is the same thing as an ornithorine kiss? You won't know that ahead of time and so this data doesn't come together Therefore the right way to do link data the part of the spec is that you point Well, I have a pointer that you point each of these terms to some reference on the web You the the term is a link this point to something Tasmania points to some geographic reference in that way if These two clouds have data pointing at the same page encyclopedia of life Computer can figure out that the same thing and if this person over here points instead to the Tasmanian field guide And somebody on the web somewhere maps the to the encyclopedia of life and the field guide So that we know that this page there is that page there then the computers can start making all sorts of connections and assumptions This is pretty exciting It's quite astounding in the library world for sure But it changes the fundamental nature of facts facts used to look like bricks now they're links They're fundamentally in their nature at their heart linked and So these changes in the structuring of knowledge are They're happening fractally they're happily happening recursively all the way down from the higher highest ends of the collection of knowledge Down to its very elements. They're getting linked messy Destructured it is a properly recursive Or fractal system so back to the question. I can't answer so why were our old knowledge systems would serve us so well So fragile. I don't know but here's one guess If you look at the traditional Properties of knowledge and I see my last revision I screwed up the animation So just take it for me for me. I'll read them that it's bounded knowledge is bounded typically in books It's settled. It's orderly it's step-by-step and it proceeds through reason Very different from the properties Knowledge in the age of the internet where it's it's so much overwhelming. It's unbounded. It's unsettled It's messy. It's linked and it's based on the connections are drawn by passion and interest Well, okay, these are properties of knowledge. That's what I'm arguing in the linked age It's there also properties of the internet in the linked age because that's my argument You know that the internet is a medium is conferring its properties upon knowledge that lives there But these are also properties of what it means to be human in the world It's always we didn't need the internet to discover this This is always what it's meant to be a human in the world trying to live in it Perhaps trying to know it and so I want to draw two very quick conclusions The first is that network knowledge may or may not be True or about the world. I think there are good reasons to think that it is and I would make that argument Not always of course, but that is letting us know the world truthfully in ways We couldn't before but leave that aside. We can argue about that may network knowledge may not be true or about the world, but I think it is Clearly truer about the nature of knowledge and that is a I think an important reason why this crazy Knowledge that we see on the internet feel sort of Familiar to us feels home like to many of us in the second conclusion. I want to draw is that the old dream Is not going to work because what we have in common is not one knowledge about which we all agree We don't now. We know it. We can hear it. We can see it that we don't agree. Well, we have in common Remains a shared world about which we disagree So if there is going to be a piece offered by knowledge the old dream, it's going to be a very very noisy piece Thank you David, thank you Even for ending on a downer of a note We have to find a way to back up only if noisy pieces a bad thing actually a noisy piece is a joyous piece So I'm actually happy about it. All right, that's good No, we can be happy about that So we have one of your classic problems here, which is there are three human beings and we have to find a way to order them I was thinking alphabetical or reverse alphabetical, but if you have any insights based on this book I can do it otherwise. I stand in such awe and trembling of This this panel that I think I offer enough. I'm speechless highly conventional I'm going to ask professor Blair with her beat to go first if that would be okay And then Mary Lee Kennedy and Ethan Zuckerman third So you're most welcome to come on up or to do it right from there as you as you prefer Be glad to give you the mic Thanks so much so as the author of too much to know I have to start by Thanking you for such a great title too big to know and not only that but the great subtitle Which is even more absurdly long than mine So I hope that there will be users seeking one of our books out of confusion find the other and We'll linger and find something of interest because I think in fact we are talking about Similar issues from very different vantage points, of course So I just want to pick up on some of the early parts of your your book Which actually I noticed some of the Amazon users have noticed is the pyramid of knowledge you talk about in the 50s computers generate data and punch cards and Software promises you data management to produce information in the 80s. We have tons and tons of information We look to something to bring us knowledge Here we are 30 years later We've got Wikipedia which brings us a fair amount of a lot of information certainly in a fair amount of systematic knowledge And of course now what we want is wisdom and the question is in 30 years Will we be turning to the room or the net for that? I suppose we'll just have to wait and see So with that pyramid from data to information to knowledge to wisdom Over the last, you know, 50 years I'd like to think back to the previous 2,000 years of how we got to the idea that so much stuff was worth bothering about and so maybe I'll you started with the acropolis so I'll put Play-Doh in our mental Map and his idea is the purpose of life is wisdom And wisdom of course Socrates is the wisest of men because he doesn't think he's wise and He doesn't think he knows anything basically or he doesn't over extend what he knows So in that mindset a lot isn't really such a great thing. What you want is wisdom And of course there are always been Proponents of that view early Christians were among them to that faith and lifestyle were more important than knowing a lot of things But I would say then we have Aristotle one of Plato's students coming along and offering as a goal for philosophy Episteme or Schiantia certain knowledge and he's going to use syllogisms and observation to build up philosophy in its many branches rhetoric ethics physics Metaphysics and so on and that's of course the form the disciplinary format of learning With some hiccups down to the late Middle Ages Late Middle Ages is when the term information first is used in English mainly with a legal connotation But over time also applying to what Francis Bacon would call all those facts that we should be gathering Even if we don't know what we're really going to do with them And that's of course the period that I've studied in my book about reference books Which gather up is not the term they use but I think it applies conceptually information stuff that you can use then in your writing or your speeches or your sermons to make knowledge from and so the era of Information explosion already is is well commented on for the 18th century an area a time when there were many many reference books and encyclopedias and the term information really Took off and that's the precise of the period when data is first used in English Although mainly in theological and mathematical contexts as given rather than assumptions or price-to-posita and Then of course data has to wait until the 1950s to really take off as a term So this is all thanks to some great work being done by Paul do good and Dan Rosenberg on those terms And of course a little boost from Google and Graham viewer and so on so That's that's the other pyramid the inverted pyramid starts from a very small idea of what we want Which would be wisdom to certain knowledge then to all kinds of things Even if we don't know what we're to make of it and on to basically raw data stuff generated automatically by instruments That then needs processing down So I suppose I'm putting a plug in for our two stories of information overload And what I see they have in common in fact you've emphasized the differences But it seems to me from my early modern work that the impulse to accumulate to save is already very present there and Some of the mantras of the folks I've worked on were no books so bad that some good could not be gotten of it Which of course is taken out of Pliny Pliny the younger's description of how his uncle worked and The other mantra by an abundant note taker from the 17th century is that he would write everything down Lest it be forgotten in the hopes that it would advantage someone some day So I think we are still in this economy of Uninterrupted accumulation there haven't been the kind of catastrophic Civilizational losses that characterized the end of the Roman Empire and that the encyclopedia of Dideron de Lambert was ready to jump in and save In case of catastrophic loss you could reconstruct all necessary knowledge from their 17 volumes was the claim they made So I see continuities To to a great extent. I just want to talk a bit about your book and what I see as a great strength I Emphasize three great qualities. There are many others of course. It's nuanced It's neither techno deterministic nor supercessionary and it's optimistic So as David pointed out in this Elequent talk the net doesn't filter out the way the process of paper production does The good news is of course at all kinds of things that wouldn't have gotten to print into print are on the web And I have to say at 6 a.m. Trying to tie a tie for my son off to a debate tournament I don't have a book that tells you how to tie a tie YouTube you know multiple computers running multiple videos and of course as it really happened the room kicked in in the bus When someone else tied it for me This is you know husband to sleep and the husband doesn't know how to tie a tie either. I think at this point So yes, you can find all kinds of great stuff on the web And of course the downside though and this is where the nuance comes in is you can find data and authoritative Statements to support any position So there's no hiding the conclusion that once authoritative seeming facts or arguments are no longer objective or universal So what you can do then is make your work transparent show where you get your stuff show where you're coming from your links and experience the diversity Exiting your echo chambers every so often to tour the world a bit That's nuance. A second point is I love David's model of avoiding techno determinism The net looks different in different parts of the world even in Europe Google books pulls up different Materials than in the US and of course the web looks very different in countries with serious censorship It looks different to users within a single political system And secondly, it isn't an argument about supercession Although in the talk I felt a little bit more of the super session argument But in on in the book David's account doesn't see the net as replacing The old institutions of knowledge rather as he puts it It's about putting them in a new and broader context and what those institutions that come to my mind, of course Are schools universities peer-reviewed journals and granting processes? libraries and I hope that others will appreciate that there would be serious consequences to thinking that the net can stand in For those institutions Finally, this is an optimistic book. Yes, the net has problems Some of them are built into the diversity of human experience and the democratic use of the net and We shouldn't seek to fix them We should know what the net's good for and not try and make it into something it isn't but some things can be improved and That's where the call for metadata Data performing data commons participating in the collective process of knowledge formation I just like to close maybe on for a call since we're a lot of us are educators whether in libraries or in schools universities It seems to me. I do hope that we are imparting Mental maps and the wherewithal to make judgments because that's what Everyone's gonna need out there I'm not sure that a completely unstructured vision of the world is really what helps one navigate The net although of course, I'm not of the born digital generation I do worry so my second son who's younger, you know, the elementary school teacher says never use Wikipedia But that's not actually the solution and of course it seems the teacher just seems like a hypocrite when of course We all know she's using it too Well, certainly I am So what do we need we need the teacher to explain the how you weigh How you notice discrepancies and how you reach judgments about discrepancies how you look elsewhere for other sources and That I suppose is a matter of having a mental map with which to navigate we might My hope that these things get constructed. I know it out of new ways, but nonetheless constructed in the order that lies ahead Thanks Professor Blair, I think you are much like Socrates in the sense that you always state things in such a nice Understated humble way and yet of course you say a great deal So thank you for that and along with teachers who put things into context We all know that librarians put things into context and are much needed and not any less in fact in my view More needed today than in the past and we have a great one among us Mary Lee Kennedy Thank you. Hi, David. I think I'm just gonna sit here. That's okay First of all, I want to thank you for putting into long form What many of us have been struggling to put into some form for quite some time You have connected dots and you have offered us if this then possibly that I'm reading several books at the moment and I'm also Interested in the fact that what I'm reading is in very many ways connected to some of the themes that have come up in your book one of them is really about Why do these institutions fall apart it's a hard question and there are many people in this room who have been studying this in in depth but the question stems from the fact that these institutions that were created in just creating enormous amounts of disruptive change and unsettling to Civilization and proportions that no one could have imagined. This is not news This has been happening to us for quite a long time And so the question really is what are we going to do about building a knowledge? Infrastructure and this is the part of the book that I have focused on today So in your book you talked about a new shape of knowledge Knowledge on the net and I love these words which is knowledge is lumpy Intertwiningly networked contained in a web of ideas Conversations and arguments all linked and traversable. I mean you must love playing with words But there are still all these tensions between truths and untruths and You've provided a thoughtful review of real advantages and disadvantages of both forms You showed us what makes it harder for us now is really that we don't have any Foundation on which we can all rest for very long and so for those of us in this kind of field that's a Opportunity and a challenge and so today is Professor Darden and I often discuss we are caught in a time warp between the long-form book and The net knowledge revolution and we're really not sure where it's going We are entering though into a new shape of knowledge When we really don't have a handle on yet But by its very nature this new shape of knowledge is challenging the way we think about the world and How we make sense of it and people are asking Are our brains changing? So there's this other book I've been looking at which is called thinking fast and slow And it's all about two modes of human thinking mode one is based on sort of this automatic Automatic pilot if you like where there's not a lot of sense of voluntary control and in general if we ask somebody Answer this phrase two plus two equals The vast majority are going to just jump into an answer of four but mode to ask us Think hard about this and so it might be something like how many times in David's presentation Did the letter a show up? We have to think hard about that And so is the net actually? Amplifying one mode over the other is my question is the way we're actually thinking about knowledge and how we jump for one thing to the other affecting the way I think Fast or slow or is it because I think fast and slow that I work differently on the net Is the note net really making us stupider or smarter and you astutely advise us We will only settle these questions by living through them I've just started another book By Kathleen Fitzpatrick called planned obsolescence Publishing technology and the future of the Academy and it's too early for me to share with you Anything insightful? But it seems a proposal to the creation of a new infrastructure for knowledge that we have to understand these issues as well and So as an information professional who has enjoyed your book enormously, and if you don't know I've written I think I'm almost every page I Am looking forward to Thinking about and working on ways that you mentioned Enabling an infrastructure that enables connections and curations of the abundance Leveraging the collective intelligence that creates credentialed knowledge Contributing to the wild connectivity of the net exploring the explorations enabling the exploration of differences and thereby improving learning and Building bridges between long form and network knowledge, which will be here for some time to come Needless to say David you have given us plenty to think about and it is fascinating and You have even proposed ways to take advantage of the net strength and so I ask myself. What are we waiting for? Seems like the only way forward is to embrace the future and lead on So thank you for setting such a bright and bold example Thank you One of the great pleasures of the last ten years of my life is summed up in the single day of Tuesday Anybody involved in the Berkman Center knows immediately what I mean Which is that's the day in which people tend to come in person in physical space to the Berkman Center for lunch And then fellows often stick around and have debate and one of the reasons why Tuesdays are so deep and meaningful to me is Having watched a conversation listened to a conversation been part of a conversation with David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman two of the great Truly most successful. There are many other wonderful and stock and others in the room Fellows of the Berkman Center and this conversation which I'm looking forward to hearing a bit more about here Is one that's taken the form almost of what you have in your book Which is you've written you've published together in various ways in very formal kinds of formats You've talked a lot But you've also tweeted at one another and blogged at one another and argued like crazy in all of these different networked ways And so it's almost perfectly fitting that in sort of the oldest school academic way here We are face-to-face hearing you critique his book. I look forward to yet another great critique Ethan Zuckerman. Thank you for being here Thanks JP and Thank you David for for writing something so wonderful and giving us the chance to react and think And engage with these ideas Let me say that when I when I moved on from Harvard to MIT It was in part because they'd initially promised me the chance to lead a Department of Weinberger studies I'm planning on holding them to that a little bit later or perhaps coming here and working on it But as I think about David's work, I'm going to characterize this perhaps as the book that shifts us from the early Weinberger to the middle Weinberger And I'm going to suggest that you know, it may be the early middle in part because I'm hoping for my friend's long and productive career, but also because I really think that David is opening up in this book This really vast and somewhat scary chasm, and I want to slightly disagree with with my two colleagues Which is I don't think this is a happy book I I think we're we're sort of smiling our way through this book in part because David is Basically a stand-up comedian as well as a philosopher of great depth but you know, we've just had a very smart man stand up in front of us and tell us that Facts are not what we thought they were That consensus on knowledge is not something that is perhaps even achievable And and that this notion that somehow the solution to a left-right divide or a multicultural divide Is that we can all sit and talk it through and we're going to end up in the same place And if that doesn't leave you unsettled, which is of course unsettling knowledge the title of this talk I'm not quite sure what will unsettle you. So I I want to go to What I think is David's fundamental insight on this in some ways, which is that When we tend to think about some of the revolutions that have taken place over the last 20 years There's a real tendency to think of these revolutions in financial terms, you know What killed the Boston globe? Well, you know the classified ad market fell out and you know Suddenly everybody moved to the web and and what David is really saying is put economics to the side, you know Economics is all well and good. It's very exciting. What really kills the Boston globe is that the nature of what happens in the world The nature of facts itself is being changed by two abilities The ability for all of us to have our say in one fashion or another and the ability to link it together And to be able to find it and in some cases it doesn't hugely complicate a fact in other cases it massively complicates a fact and I think if we really take seriously the argument that David is making it's deeply unsettling He's not making the argument that we simply can't make money producing encyclopedias or newspapers anymore He's making the argument that the notion that we are going to put something Artharatatively in print like a book and sort of say that's where we stop is an absurdity at this point in time And and if we take that serious then we really wrestle with this I think that puts forward an amazing challenge and I think it's an amazing challenge that David sort of gives us Road signs towards but I think you know as as Doc Searles was saying earlier today We're we're three nanoseconds after the Big Bang right if this is a change as big as knowledge is no longer shaped The way it used to be it's gonna take us a very very long time to figure out how to navigate our way through this So what I what I want to suggest is that the happy consequence of this is that there really is the possibility of knowing the world in a very different way and It's knowing the world in terms of being able to both cope with The set of facts that you're working with and fully understanding and accepting that there are others out there that believe Two plus two is five just as passionately as you believe that two plus two is four and and on the immediate surface that that sounds you know Sort of like a logical challenge. I mean obviously there's got to be a fallacy there We've got to work through our logic but I think the deep challenge that David is putting forward is the notion that to really understand in this linked world is To understand that we are somehow taking part in in the piece of this We're getting on with our lives with the piece of interpretations and the piece of facts that we can deal with But we're also accepting the full complexity of all that's out there and and those of us who really figure out how to navigate This new linked space this new space where where facts are not the fixed things that we thought they were and where knowledge Isn't the thing where we can sit down and simply argue our way to it Gives the possibility of succeeding in a very very different way And so now I want to make an economic analogy because I think David's book pushes me in sort of the same direction And towards one of the the same very difficult questions to answer in sort of one of the favorite ideas that I've encountered in The last year which comes from Ricardo Hausman who's put forward this lovely book called the Atlas of Economic Complexity and what Hausman who continues to try to figure out what went wrong when he was the planning minister of Venezuela Is trying to think about is is how do you think of economies in terms of what they're able to produce and what he ends up saying is Think of this in terms of person bites It takes a certain amount of knowledge to know how to print a book on paper It takes a certain amount of knowledge to know how to bind a book It takes a certain amount of knowledge to know how to write a book and at a certain point your entire Embodied knowledge the sort of expertise that the David is talking about that's a person bite So it's taken a person bite an extremely bright person bite to be able to create the text for this But it also requires many more person bites to figure out how you actually produce this and distribute this and get this printed and so on and so forth and Hausman argues that you can basically figure out What economies can and can't do based on how many person bites of knowledge you have in them if you have knowledge that only allows you to Make leather works you're not in a very advanced economy Whereas if you're an economy that allows you to make a MacBook you might be bringing together Thousands of person bites about metallurgy and about circuit design and so on and so forth And so his hope is that we can somehow understand economies by lining up an Experts if we have the expert metallurgists and we have the expert designers We'd line them all up together and we're at a certain level of economic complexity But then he sort of says well wait a second. Obviously it doesn't work that way What really works is that somehow we find some way to have the knowledge the knowledge of what it means to make this MacBook which is somehow living between all of those experts between all of those minds all those different Perspectives all the different ways of viewing things and when you try to look at the world in terms of that complexity I think it starts forcing you into this question of not knowledge as a single thing known by one person in one place But knowledge is a process and knowledge as a group of people Trying to figure out the working definition what we're going to stand on at the particular moment at the time So in the same way that I'm counting on Ricardo to sort of solve the problem of how economies move forward from getting from a Few experts to a complicated economy what I'm really hoping we're going to get out of the middle Wine burger and someday the later wine burger is more help in helping us sort of figure out Now that we've really had these these supports knocked out from under us now that we know That it's not enough to simply assume that Republicans are just wrong and eventually they're going to come around and agree with us or Vice versa But that really we are dealing with a world in which we have to deal with the entire web and the entire Complexity and the entire linkage of knowledge just the absolute truth how we navigate this how we discover How we get along and how we move forward? I think it's the sort of question that if you really pay attention to is deeply uncomfortable and deeply unsettling which makes it Perhaps the most sort of exciting question you can actually wrestle with and where I think David makes his strongest case Is that that old form of knowledge where we simply pin it down and we say this is it this is a fact And we know it that's always felt a little strange. That's always felt a little weird It doesn't feel like it it Describes our world very well the world that David's describing is much messier. It's much harder to navigate It's much harder to figure out how to plot our course But by helping us try to wrestle with that very messiness. I think David's done us an enormous favor He's pushed us off into the deep end. I think that's what's so wonderful about this book And I think that's what's so wonderful about my friend as a thinker and a writer David obviously this topic is too big to discuss only in 75 minutes And since the room is also the smartest part Would you be willing to take a few questions even though we're going over by no questions? No, yeah I'll be very sorry for stretching the time a little bit. I know people It will be not rude to walk out now if you need to but maybe just Should we maybe stack up a few comments, then you respond or how would you like to do it? Sure? Why don't we have at least three comments and then David can respond with the final note? And in the interim I This is this is like the the nightmare roast where you have incredibly smart sweet people saying nice things about you and Thank you so much and disagreeing a little bit. Yes. Absolutely only gently. Yeah, there must be some comments We bought enough time for that Or people would really like a drink outside apparently Yes, please and if you wouldn't mind press your red button, and then you will be Amplified okay am I on all right what I'm hearing in all of this is a philosophical challenge to our notion of truth and I'm wondering if in your book or if maybe tonight you could elaborate on Some of the some of the traditional definitions of truth and how we might be changing which one of those we subscribe to Whether that's a good idea have at the risk of you know setting myself with a with a conundrum have we gotten truth wrong? Right that kind of a book David It's a wonderful question and you're putting your finger on something that I've been desperately I desperately try to avoid in the book end here, which is Metaphysics and that is a discussion of our Relationship to the world which is what the question of especially the traditional notion of truth plunges us straight into because in the West the most important definition understanding of truth is is That it's a representation of the truth It applies to statements and that the statements are true when they correspond to the state of affairs in the world There are does that I from my point of view disastrous metaphysical and metaphysical and psychological Consequences of believing that you are talking about filter bubbles, which is a Eli Pariser book that is about the echo chamber Talk about filter bubbles the the truth bubble where you are living in a representation of the world That either is either does or does not correspond to the world Even if it does correspond you're not living in the world You're living in in a in a bubble and this is maybe the founding insight of Martin Heidegger was that there's something crazy about untrue deeply untrue about this idea of truth and In the past 60 years the philosophy have been in many ways the most important that many of the most important ideas are addressing this representational idea of truth so the The relation to knowledge First of all, it's an obvious one because knowledge is knowledge of you know of true things it gets a little bit to What Ethan was saying which is there's a question that I don't want to address in the book or anywhere Later in life such as it is or now Because I don't know how to it's too hard for me, but it's the extent to which the nature of knowledge of Network knowledge as something that is inherently messy messy and contains difference and disagreement and is many ways stronger because of that as well as having The disastrous consequences that Ethan raises Whether that is not not only representative That is not only true or to what it means to be a human in the world Whether in fact it is in fact a better representation of the world, but whether the world is in fact messy and contradictory In ways that we that postmodernists have been talking about and that are too difficult for me to understand Robert Dutton, I think I saw your What I enjoyed among many other things David in your presentation was what makes us Uncomfortable namely the utter chaos of knowledge Endless data points swimming around My question Concerns what I sensed maybe wrongly to be a missing dimension not philosophy not data points But what you could call social science? And I would give you a one example From Edmund Leach.  There is a kind of energy That has to do with the way categories hang together or do not hang together and Your notion that we can do without categories That we can live in a world of sheer data points swirling around Seems to me to radically misrepresent The way societies operate we all have categories. They're imperfect But I think part of the effort to understand the human condition is to see the way we organize life through classification systems going back to the old card catalogs of the libraries and Modify those categories fight about them and sometimes when it comes to questions of race and so on fight fiercely about them So my challenge would be how would you answer Edmund Leach's? provocation I would apologize for miss speaking I fully acknowledge the importance and In some ways the primacy I want to shade this in a moment the primacy of categories Absolutely right language is impossible without having something like Categories so and by no means do I think that we encounter the world as a swirl of data individually or collectively and that we somehow swim through this sea of Disconnected or overly connected data points. I don't that's not at all what I what I think so I put this badly The argument I think to be had is with the old notion that there is a single right category That is the failure to recognize that categories are our in fact expressions of Interest what matters to you?  We care about what happens to other people unless we're sociopaths and we'll leave them aside and in response to these issues of care what matters to us what interests us at the moment we Categorize the world quite fluidly. We always have We've always done that because we've had to but we've also had a countervailing Philosophy that is said some of some of these categories have to be real Some of these categories are the real thing and to know what it's something is is to see what the correct category is And so we still we have debates about whether bloggers are journalists or not It's a category question many things hang on it and so we need to have the debate But the question isn't really which category doesn't go in that's not solvable There is no one right answer to that question What matters is well, how are we going to treat them? That's what matters We have arguments about Pluto where the Pluto is a planet whereas If you are an astronomer, which I am not You don't much care about the category planets what you care about is perhaps Big objects in space that have atmospheres because you care about weather you're studying extraterrestrial weather that becomes a very important category to you Not to me because I'm not studying that things you can see at night on that are romantic or that you could put a Telescope on and it will enlarge in a useful way That's an interesting category if you're out at night and you want to do that those cat though So we you need those categories, but the notion that there is a single right category And that the way to acknowledge in truth is discern those is the idea that we have given up before the net But the net has kicked to smithereens and I think quite useful the one little addenda might add to that is Eleanor rush has can Persuaded me convinced me to some degree that actually even thinking about this as categories is probably not quite the right idea We probably actually think about things in terms of prototypical objects around which we cluster But it has the same basic effect. It leaves us not in a swirl of data atoms And it's it's a series of categories based or prototypes based upon our interests and our projects Paralleled with the explosion of the web came the importance of personal relationships personal information not only as a filtering or Valuing mechanism, but really you know the people saw new ways of building community new ways of building a sense of self new ways of building a sense of understanding not only in the context of this broad Ocean of of data, but just in terms of getting on with life and so Coincident with that first came lots of things of Groups that never physically meet and yet have the same sense of intimacy same sense of purpose and loyalty that Old-time villages would have Could you talk a bit about that social dimension to understanding and how that's been manifest in In these times of Wonderful question And talk about what may be way too obvious, but at least I can be brief about it, which is I'll speak for myself So I'm sort of old school. So I'm on lots of mailing lists. That's my social networking primary social networking tool You know, I try out others, but I'm on mailing lists Including Berkman mailing lists Those turn out to be for me the primary Place that I learn about topics that I know that I'm interested in so I'm on a mailing list of people who care About FCC policy and I it's over my head But I learn a huge amount by watching people who disagree with them up that they're they have in common that they're speaking English And they care about the FCC and they have some general shared body of knowledge And then they have some lurkers like me and but they disagree about policy and they go at it So any any issue that comes up I hear about first through that mailing list and I haven't explained in a way that I could never ever ever have had before Mailing lists existed. I wouldn't have had the inclination or time to go read a ton of Journal articles about it go to the library and do that. I just wouldn't have but now it's in it's coming to me and I watch these minds Interact based upon some deep knowledge and shallow knowledge as well. That's where learning happens and for me That's where knowledge happens as well And I suspect that everybody in this room has similar sets whether it's mailing lists or something else That's where we're learning. That's where we're seeing knowledge development and in every case because the internet is almost unique as a medium In that there is it provides no boundary between information communication and sociality These informational sessions build bonds social bonds And so these people become they may be odd sort of friends But that is roughly the right word to use for these people who I have not met There was just no barrier between those three things and because we're human beings. We don't like barriers between information We don't like information enough to try to keep it in its box. We want it to turn into communication We wanted to turn it to sociality Just a footnote to that David and I've been on the same mailing list for Dozen plus years and that's how I found out about this That is That's some serious code going on awesome, please join me in thanking David Weinberger and congratulating Thank you. Thank you so much


This new form of matter could have really exciting potential applications in fusion energy. And it would essentially bring fusion energy to practical commercialization within five years. My name is Arun Johnson. I am a student at the University of California Berkeley and I'm an Emergent Ventures grantee. The EV grant that I have at the moment is specifically designated to be not a particular project but rather a slush fund for a number of projects that I wanna work on in chemistry and physics. The one project that I'm focusing on right now is trying to replicate an experiment done by a group in Sweden that has described a new form of matter. And they have shown evidence that this new form of matter could have really exciting potential applications in fusion energy. What I'm trying to do is to replicate some of their experiments along with a group in Iceland to see if the material really does have all the properties that they believe it to have. Relating to the specific EV project that I'm working on right now, the optimistic scenario for it is that we're able to confirm everything that this group has laid out, able to scale up the synthesis of the material that they've created and it would essentially bring fusion energy to practical commercialization within five years. That's a very optimistic scenario. I hope it happens. Outside of that, where I'd like to see myself in five years is working to solve climate change in some way, but I deliberately don't want to be too specific about that because describing a specific idea of a path I want to take feels like a sort of commitment to me. I want to leave that open for now.


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