>> Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to introduce David
Weinberger who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker series.
David is here today to discuss his book, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the
Facts Aren't Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room.
It argues that in the connected age, the concept of knowledge itself has changed. It is now social,
open, and networked.
David Weinberger is a senior researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and
Society, codirector of Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, and is leading the development of an
open software platform for the Digital Public Library of America.
He was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department and has been published in many journals,
including Wired, Scientific American, and The New York Times.
He is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything is Miscellaneous, and a coauthor of
The Cluetrain Manifesto.
Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause].
>> David Weinberger: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Amy. Or Debbie, as
you prefer to be called.
Thank you for making your way through the snow. I really appreciate it. The first time I tried to
give this talk you got an inch of snow and, thus, the entire campus shut down. An inch of snow
is what we in Boston call spring. So I'm very glad to be here.
So I'm actually going to try to go through this presentation faster than usual without necessarily
talking faster on the grounds that much of this will be familiar.
So we've had this problem since the beginning of the pursuit of knowledge in our culture. And
I'm only talking about Western knowledge. It's the only thing I know anything about. Which is
that we've known that the world is much, much bigger than our little tiny craniums can contain.
You know, we have under three pounds of brain, then we want to know how the universe started
and how it's going to end and how everything works in it, and it's just a lot of stuff to get into one
brain.
And we've known that. And so we've had to come up with strategies for dealing with this most
basic fact about knowledge in the world.
And the most basic element of this strategy that we've had for about 2,500 years in the West is to
deal with the fact the world's way too big to know, we have come up with strategies for reducing
what an individual needs to know. And one of those is, one of the most important, is to enable
people to break off a brain-sized chunk of the world and to know it thoroughly. We call those
people experts. And they're amazing. They're a foundation of our advance as a civilization.
So you go to an expert and you either ask the expert or you read the expert's book and you get an
answer, and this is the really important part, you can now stop asking the question. That's more
or less the role of experts, whether it's externalized expertise in the form of a book or in person.
That's where the efficiency of our system comes from; that we can get an answer and not have to
ask that question anymore and we don't have to redo the experiment, we don't have to redo the
research, we've got it, we've nailed it down, or the expert has nailed it down, we can rely upon it,
we can move on.
And if we don't trust the expert because it seems like a crazy answer we can ask to see some
credentials and the person may point at the diploma on the wall and we say, oh, I didn't see, I
didn't know you were a -- got your chemistry degree from Oxford so now I'll believe you.
So we have the second set of stopping points in our system, which are our set of credentials.
And this system works incredibly well. It has made us the dominant species on the planet. So I
don't want to sort of dismiss it in favor of the digital too easily, but it's important I think to
recognize that this system is not how knowledge itself works. It's how knowledge works when
its medium is paper.
Paper, for all of its glory, is nevertheless -- and I'm not going to say all the positive things about
books and paper that one should especially if one works in the basement of a library, as I do, I'm
going to assume -- on the other hand, books are stopping points. They are disconnected. They
are physically disconnected. And I'm not saying anything profound or even all that interesting.
They are physically disconnected from every other book in the world. Of course they come out
of a connected all ideas, all thought is profoundly social. Of course. But books are physically
disconnected.
So when you want to go from one -- the idea you read in the book to another, if there's a
footnote, you can't click on the footnote. You have to actually get on a bus and go to a major
downtown area, find the local library, look up the book, go find it in the stack, and it's probably
taken out anyway. They probably don't have it.
Books are very disconnected. Our concept of knowledge is based around this primitive fact
about its medium. What counts as a topic is what fits between covers. The book can't be this
big, can only be this big or this big.
Even an ocean of a concept, something that is self-contained enough and we write our books so
the reader does not have to escape the book, you have to give the reader everything that she
needs in order to progress. So we will take somebody else's book that we want to talk about,
entire book, rich with thought, and we'll condense it to a single extract, you know, four lines, and
we'll try to summarize what the other author said and to encapsulate it within our book because
that's how books work. You can't just click and send the reader off to read it.
So books a terribly disconnected and our concept of knowledge has been terribly, terribly,
terribly limited by this physical limitation.
But now of course new age, we're in a connected age, new type of punctuation, the link, which
rather than telling us to stop, as most punctuation does, it tells us how to continue, and not only
tells us and enables us to continue, and so my hypothesis is that this new medium for knowledge,
the Internet -- I hope I didn't give anything away here -- is passing on to knowledge its properties
just as knowledge inherited the properties of its old medium, paper.
And so I want to talk about three different properties of the Internet that knowledge is inheriting,
there are others, of course, and then I want to look at three examples of where knowledge lives,
which I think pretty obviously is in networks, not in books. Not on paper.
So the first property of the Internet that I think knowledge is inheriting is -- there's way too much
stuff. That's all. Just huge amounts of stuff. This is Clay Shirky, as you all know, who said this
about a year ago, this brilliant way of putting a really important point, which is there's no such
thing as information overload, only filter failure. Clay I believe in this is pointing back to say
don't freak out about information overload; it happens all the time in our history and we get over
it. We adjust our filters. Don't panic.
And Blair has a book, Too Much to Know, that came out a few months before my book. Slightly
confusing. I understand. Two books on knowledge. Too Much to Know is a wonderful history
of information overload. Clay looks back to Gutenberg and goes further back in history. You
can go all the way back to Seneca who in the year 4 was complaining that there were too many
books to read.
Too Much to Know is really good. And that's also a type of historical comfort; that we've always
had this problem, yet we've managed to deal.
So it is important, I think, to keep this continuity in mind, but I want to point to two areas of
discontinuity. And the first is the amount of knowledge. So the phrase "information overload"
was popularized by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock. The phrase itself comes quite
explicitly. He popularized it. He didn't invent it. It arose in the 1960s. And if you look at The
New York Times citations, almost all of them are in the context -- information overload arose in
the context of the government trying to frighten parents and their children's drug use.
Information overload, it was based on -- explicitly upon the notion of sensory overload which
arose in the early 1950s, the concept did, and the concept was of course that if you go to a loud
concert with the kids and they're singing and they're rock 'n' roll, then you can be overstimulated,
overload your circuits -- this is very much an electrical metaphor -- and you will lose capacity.
You'll fall down, you'll start to twitch and froth.
And so the idea was that once we decided for reasons that are bizarre, from my point of view,
that actually, no, we're not just sensory organisms, we are information processors, then therefore
there must be this analogic thing to sensory overload called information overload and it's what
happens to you when you get too much information.
So 1970, Toffler is talking about this. He says -- his book is very serious and really good, by the
way, but he says sanity hangs upon avoiding information overload; that it will do to our
cognitive abilities what sensory overload does to our sensory apparatus.
So what did information overload look like 1970? Future Shock is a bestseller. The idea begins
to spread. 1974 some research done by some academic marketers is published in which they did
a study in which they asked 192 housewives to look at 16 different brands, each of which had a
label on it that listed 16 different ingredients or calories and the like. 16 pieces of information.
And these categories were themselves already reduced to simple yes, no, high cal, no cal, not the
number of calories.
And so they did their study and they discovered that these poor housewives, their cognitive
ability went down with this much information, 16 brands, 16 yes/no categories. This was
information overload in 1974.
This is not what we mean by information overload now. We're so far past this that this is
laughable. This is ridiculous.
The marketers, by the way, realizing that their -- their research showed that the poor housewives
who were unable to deal with this much information, their decision-making capability went
down, that therefore it was a responsibility of marketers to keep this information from consumers
and from the feral housewives. And so they now had a scientific justification for not telling us
stuff.
Nevertheless, I don't know how to measure the difference between this type of information
overload and what we now think of as information overload, but it's many, many, many, many,
many orders of magnitude larger now. So that is a discontinuity. That is a real discontinuity.
The second has to do with filters. So in the real world that is up until now, when you filter
something, you do it by removing that which gets filtered out. So if you are filtering books into
your library because you're on the acquisitions committee for your local public library, which
case, thank you very much, you're making very good decisions, people are very happy to see the
few shelves of new books that you purchase, they go in, here's the new acquisitions.
What people do not see are the million minus those -- that handful of books, the million books
that you didn't buy. They don't see long trucks backing slowly away from a loading bay with all
the books being withdrawn from the library. That's not how filters work in the physical world.
You don't see. You remove that which gets filtered out. But it's very different online. And so
you have a sense when you go into a library or any other filtered environment, I don't mean to
pick on libraries, that it's manageable. Because all that's showing you is the manageable bit.
They only show you the two dozen books. They don't show you the million.
Online it's different. Online, when you filter, all that you're doing is reducing the number of
clicks that it takes for somebody to get to something. So if you are filtering the top ten posts
about the economy this week, or whatever, and you're putting it on your blog or putting it
through any of the social media, all that you're doing is enabling people to get to those ten with a
single click. They can still get to the other million posts that were done on the economy that
week if they choose to. They can go to a search engine and who knows what will pop up or
somebody else will filter something that you didn't like, they'll filter it forward.
All that material is still there. And the contrast between that sort of filtering and the old sort of
filtering is vast. If you send a manuscript to a publisher unasked, it goes into their -- you know
what they call the pile of ->>: Slush pile.
>> David Weinberger: The slush pile. The gloriously named slush pile where a junior editor
will take a first pass through it and basically throw everything out. Occasionally something will
get through.
You as a reader will never ever, ever, ever know about any of those items. And if you know
about one, you wouldn't be able to get ahold of it, in any case, unless you can track the person
down. It's not going to happen. That stuff is lost.
That's how physical filtering has worked for 2,500 years, or more, depending on how you want
to count. It is not how Internet filtering works. All of that is still -- all of the stuff that's rejected,
that's filtered out, is still available. We filter forward, not out.
And, furthermore, the search engines have an economic interest in telling us exactly how many
results they're not showing us. And so we're constantly being told how much of an overload
there is.
And one of the consequences of this is a change in basic strategy for dealing with information.
You see this in many, many places and increasingly more and more places, which is -- if you're
going to curate -- if you want to do the job of the curator, rather than you deciding ahead of time
what you think people are going to be interested in, include it all, where "it all" is in quotes
because you can't really include it, but it's cheaper now to include things to delete them in most
instances. The economics of deletion have changed.
So people gather these vast collections trying to include everything, and for a very good reason,
which is that to curate in this initial step is to decide what's going to be interesting to people.
And so if you're curating a news site, you would exclude very likely the gossip stuff about the
Kardashians and this Britney Spears and, et cetera, et cetera, and that would be a very reasonable
thing to do, but you will have then deprived these academics of their primary research material
because they're media studies and they're studying the effect of media on women celebrities.
You didn't know it was going to be interesting, because you can't know. You just simply cannot
know what's going to be interesting to people.
Likewise, if you were curating a site, news site in 1996, you might take as your example of the
sort of frivolous stuff that of course -- so you might -- somebody might say we should include
this and you might have just responded, well, yeah, sure, we -- sarcastically, sure, we should
include this, just like we should include, I don't know, the meetings from a library meeting, the
notes from a library meeting in Wasilla, Alaska. That would have been ridiculous because you
can't know that 12 years later those meeting notes would actually be interesting because you
cannot predict history. Neither can I. We can't.
And so there's a good reason to include everything when you can. But if you're going to do that,
you have to give people powerful filters so they can filter on the way out, they can look through
the pile in the way that makes sense to them and pull out what they think is interesting.
And, as you know, much of the history of the Internet over the past 15 years has been about the
filters that we've been building, better and better filters that can manage information in ways that
an information retrieval specialist in 1999 -- are there any people -- any 1999 IR people here?
There's a little bit -- would not -- we would not have believed the power of the tools that we have
collectively developed.
So that's the first property of the Internet that knowledge is taking up. And the second is
messiness. So we are a very neat species, and not simply because we want to be able to find
things. That would be enough. But in the West for 2,500 years, the concept of knowledge itself
had to do with finding the single place in the order of nature where each natural thing went,
animal, vegetable, or mineral. And that's what it meant to know something. It was to know the
thing's place in this order, in the order.
When you talk about the order of the universe and you do it in a singular, you say it's our job as
knowers because for 2,500 years that's what it was, was our job was to figure out the order of the
universe that either reason or God had created and we as knowers or as creatures of God, our
destiny was to understand that order. And to deny that there was an order was to be either a
heretic or a lunatic. And quite literally to say, well, no, this is Nietzsche or a misinterpretation of
Heraclitus to say that there is no order is to say that we can't know and thus all is insane, cats are
dogs and everything is the same.
Now, just over the past 20 years, even less, to explain this concept to a student, to say, well, you
know, we believed that there was an order of universe, you sound like you're explaining
something medieval. Which of course you are, but it continued well up through the 19th
century, well into the 20th century. Now to think that there's a single order just seems like a
ludicrous limitation when you can have as many different tags and sorting systems as you want.
The notion that there was a single order is suspiciously like how physical objects work. Just as
knowledge has taken on the properties of its physical medium, I think it's reasonable to think that
the notion of the order of the universe arose from properties of the physical world.
So here's a CD store back when we had these, and somebody had -- so that's just a transcription
of this -- somebody had to decide whether Philly Wacko is going to go in British psych or in
acids, visionaries, and weirdos.
And there was very likely a lively argument about this. You and your spouse or your roommate
are trying to organize your CDs, if you still have them, only one of you can win. If you want to
do it by genre and your SO wants to do it be chronology, only one of you is going to win because
that's how physical objects work. There can only be one order. Everything has to go in some
place. That's exactly how we conceived of the intellectual order of the universe.
Now, of course, we wouldn't have that argument because we just do playlists and we'd have as
many different ways of organizing it simultaneously as we can. Over the past ten years, we've
generated billions and billions and billions of playlists, and each one adds a little bit of
knowledge and information and idea about how things go together.
And, most important, we don't have to decide among them. We don't have to figure out which is
the right playlist. There isn't a right playlist. The idea is ridiculous, just as sorting through
things in more significant ways, the idea there's a single right way of organizing your books is, or
whatever -- is ridiculous.
One consequence of this, however, is that you get a huge, huge mess. Billions of playlists.
However, each of these playlists have little value beyond the value to the creator. They tell us
something about how things go together. And it turns out that messiness is exactly how you
scale meaning.
There's so much more meaning and connection now expressed, not just in playlists, I mean,
that's -- I'm using that as a simple example -- and the ways in which we link things together in all
the different ways that we have of linking, by hand and semantic Web, all that stuff.
Third property of knowledge, and, remember, I'm not going to be done because then I have three
types of knowledge networks to look at, is that knowledge is unsettled, just as the Internet is
unsettled.
So Senator Moynihan. There's this wonderful quote that keeps turning up. Everyone is entitled
to his own opinion but not his own facts. And I think one of the reasons that we like this quote is
it's sort of comforting because it tells us an old promise that knowledge is made to us. We
don't -- knowledge in English is a singular. We don't have knowledges. There is this thing
called knowledge, and it is that which we can all agree upon. If you sit down calmly and you
have a discussion back and forth and you agree to look at the facts, you will come to agreement
and we can live in peace if we can only get to knowledge.
So this is a promise that's been made throughout the ages and certainly in the Enlightenment.
The problem is that when you go on the Internet you realize that it's not going to work. Because
on the Net there is an equal and opposite fact for every fact. Somebody pointed out that
Arthur -- I think it's Arthur C. Clarke said every expert has an equal and opposite expert, which
is a better way of putting this, actually.
This is not to say that all facts or all claimed facts are equally true and you are free to believe
what you want. Because I don't -- you know, I'm not crazy, I don't believe that for a moment.
There is a way that the world is. Some facts are actually facts and some things are pretenders of
facts. All that I'm saying is we now have empirical evidence that we are not going to agree. The
facts are not going to -- we have more access to facts than ever before. We don't have that
excuse anymore. And we are agreeing -- we're totally not agreeing any more than we did before
the Internet. It seems like we're disagreeing even more.
It's -- we are not going to agree. And we never will. And my evidence for the "never will" is
that it is all of human history. We don't agree about things. So much as we would like to think
that Moynihan's prescription is going to work, it's simply not going to. And that's too bad, but
it's not going to work. And I think it's a lesson we need to learn.
I should maybe point out that this quote itself is unattributed. It's unclear who said it or exactly
what the quote is, so -- because the supreme law of the universe is irony, apparently.
So that's sort of very discouraging. The good side of it is that when you are confronted with this
fact, then we [inaudible] spend 15 years not just devising ways of filtering, but also ways of
dealing with this fact of difference.
So I want to point to three really quickly. And the first, this is the Batman video trailer. And it's
YouTube. YouTube is famously not a very good conversational space, to put it mildly.
Nevertheless, it was about maybe six weeks ago there was about a 30-message exchange quite
consistently among two people over the question of the health elements of --
[laughter].
>> David Weinberger: So can I ask why -- why was this showing up on a Batman site? And it
turns out it's really not a very interesting answer, somebody said something about Jews and then,
you know, it immediately turned to foreskins.
[laughter].
>> David Weinberger: So here's my point. If YouTube were a better conversational space, we
would do this very common Web thing of forking the discussion. So rather than -- so we would
say, you know, YouTube guys -- I'm assuming it's a guy, just for no reason, I guess -- YouTube
guys, you're having a really interesting conversation about circumcision, but it's the Batman site
so go have that -- don't stop, that's great, that's great you're talking about it, but go have it
somewhere else. Fork the conversation.
Very easy to do on the Web. Very common. Not really all that rude. In fact, it becomes rude to
insist on continuing. Very difficult to do in the real world. Forking conversations is
embarrassing and awkward in the real world.
So forking, very powerful mechanism. We use it all the time. And it's a way of maintaining
difference.
Second way of maintaining difference I want to point to is, well, so 19th century, huge argument
about whether this thing -- what it was, and even whether it could exist, because it straddled
uncomfortably the taxonomic lines that had been laid down. And so people, scientists actually
disputed that it existed, even when they were mailed one and it had eggs in it and people -- they
said it had to be a hoax. So now we don't have this argument nearly as much.
If you go to the Encyclopedia of Life, this wonderful site, they have two servers. One of them is
a name server. So they just gather every name they can. There are actually a couple of scientific
names and a whole bunch of vernacular names for the platypus. They don't care. Whatever you
want to call it. You can look it up and they'll tell you all the names, and that's really helpful.
You may disagree about how to classify it. They don't care about that either. They have a
taxonomy server. And so you like to see it in this well-known taxonomy and I like to see it in
that other well-known taxonomy, great, they'll show it to you in whatever taxonomy you want
because it's not a helpful argument.
So just find out what it is. And once we both know what this URL is, we know that we're talking
about the same thing. And we can have a conversation about what matters.
Occasionally taxonomic questions are more important than that, but frequently they're not really
what you want to talk about.
So name space is, as this technique is known, as you know, tremendously powerful. They
become really useful in the age of computers where computers can do the matchup.
And that's actually the third way of dealing with difference I want to point to. And I want to be
really fast about this just in the interest of time. This is linked data. And you're familiar with
linked data. And so the idea is that as you put forward these clouds of data and information,
each of the elements in the data that you're putting forward should actually be a link to some site
that disambiguates it.
And that's not simply so a human being can look it up and see what you mean. More
importantly, it's to enable a computer that's looking over in this cloud and notices that fact and
looking over in this cloud and notices this fact. Even though they're speaking different
languages, there may actually be different languages, they're both -- both of these are referencing
the same page in the Encyclopedia of Life so now the computer knows that they're talking about
the same thing.
So this is also a way of -- closely related way of maintaining difference and yet being able to
profit from that expression of difference.
Okay. So now I want to look at three knowledge networks to give a sense of what I mean by
saying that knowledge is moving on to networks.
So if you are a software developer or know one, which I'm going to guess in this crowd is
probably pretty good chance, then you are -- you or your -- the person you know is in what I
think is arguably the best rapid learning environment that humans have ever created for
themselves. And I know that's arguable. That's a sort -- you know. Nevertheless, it's arguable.
I think it's defensible.
So if you have a question, at this point, this is one of the great things about scale, is it's highly
unlikely and getting less and less likely that any question you have you're the first person to have
that question. And so you have a question. You'll go you want to have a JavaScript tutorial?
Great. There's 31 million of them. And, yeah, I didn't put it in quotes, so, you know,
nevertheless, there's a lot of them there. You want to learn JavaScript? Great. You're in good
shape.
You want news, Hacker News, for example, is wonderful way of aggregating and discussing.
Total plug, by the way, if you're interested in library stuff, our library has put together this. It's
using Hacker News code which is why it looks so similar. If you have a question, a problem, a
bug, whatever, you go to maybe Stack Overflow, you'll get not only an answer, you'll get a
discussion of the answer, all the people will iterate on it and they'll post the finish code, you copy
it, and you're done. This is a pretty amazing -- amazingly efficient way of learning. So this was
a couple months ago. There are over 2 million now I'm sure.
Done. You post it. Everybody can reuse the work that you've done or build a library on top of
it. Like D3, which is just an astounding library of graphical expressions for free put out there. It
really is a pretty amazing environment.
So what lessons from this broad network of developers who are engaging with one another?
Well, first of all, very little shame in not knowing. Right? If you have a question, I've been
looking at this, I've been working on this for six hours and I can't figure out why it won't work,
and it will turn out to be something, you know, didn't put in the comma or whatever. So it's fine.
Well, it's almost fine. Occasionally it's a little embarrassing. But generally zero shame in not
knowing.
It is assumed that people will generously not only answer, they will expound upon, they'll post
their code. Generosity is assumed. Going -- going -- saying no, I'm not -- I know but I'm not
going to tell you, that's not acceptable. This is -- the ethos is highly generous.
Always show your work. You know, starting from the initial browsers. Show the code
underneath it. Show the work. Show how you got there. Because learning is a public act. In
fact, all these things I think are summed by that.
And for me this is maybe the most important thing from this example. We have a tradition in the
West of education being something that a teacher does to a student to improve the student.
Which is great because then you have better students and they go out and they do good in the
world.
And this actually goes all the way back to Socrates as part of his defense. So that's our model.
You know, when making a better society, one person at a time. And that's great, but it's even
better when the act of learning is assumed to be a public act that itself can make the public's fear
better. You learn in public.
Developers are doing this quite consciously now. I think it's only matter of time before it's
assumed in the public [inaudible] public education that education -- the process of education
itself should be public.
Now, this doesn't -- I'm not saying, therefore -- because I don't know -- in the future the Web
cam will always be on and the third grade class will always be projected into cyber -- I mean, I
don't believe that for a moment. But the idea that students should go off -- so much of our
culture has been affected and maybe infected by the publishing model.
Education, science for sure, lots and lots of spheres where people are learning or knowing. So
you do things in private until you get it right, because when you go public with it, when you
publish it, you can't take it back because it's committed to paper. The ink has sunk into the pages
and you can't take it back. And that basic model of being tentative and private and irrevocable in
public has been broken by the Internet. And I think very, very usefully.
And that includes for learning. So sending students off to do a paper on their own, they come
back and the teacher reads it. Whoever -- okay. That I think is not going to stand.
Second example of a knowledge network, so the Internet is this wonderful place where people of
all sorts come together and discuss and share and collaborate. Except that it actually really pretty
much looks like this. We tend to hang out with people who are like us. And not necessarily
ethically and gender, but in terms of our beliefs. This seems to be a basic human propensity.
I think there's an argument to be made, which I will not make sheer in the interest of time, that
it's in fact a requirement for understanding; that you understand in a context that is by and large
familiar.
In any case, we do this. One way or another, we all do this. Search engines, by the way, that
personalize through social networks make this worse. And it's not just worse by any means. I
mean, Google certainly does this as well. And it's, you know, it's worrisome. And you've all
read Eli Pariser's book, The Filter Bubble, or you will, or something. You've seen his TED talk.
And to a large extent he's right, but I actually want to push back against this a bit. This is the
echo chamber argument. Cass Sunstein is the most famous proponent of it, which says that
given a lot of the fluid choice, we will hang out with people who are like us, this will further
confirm us in our beliefs and, in fact, drive us to further extremes of our beliefs.
So an environment like the Internet, according to this argument, is likely to make us more closed
rather than more open, which would be an absolute real tragedy.
So this is a huge question. I want to deal with it in an inadequate and quick way, first of all, by
acknowledging it's a real problem. But I want to point in the side of it as well.
How many of you read reddit? Huh. Surprisingly -- I am shocked. So reddit is, as you can tell,
if you don't know already, is a site where people nominate links and people vote and then there
will be long discussion threads. It has a very particular ethos.
I am embarrassingly fond of reddit. Embarrassingly because it is a 20-year-old boy environment,
and so lots of things that they care about I don't care about or find -- on the other hand, so, first
of all, this is an echo chamber. All right. So it has a strong set of cultural values. They love
Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson walks on water, except that would be a religious
remark -- they love Ron Paul as well -- and they are confirmed atheists and they assume any
reasonable person is of course an atheist.
They love surprisingly cute -- cute animal -- kitty and doggies. Oh, come on. What, are you
made out of stone? Come on. Especially when there's an element of altruism, because it's a very
consciously, self-consciously altruistic ethos, which I think is actually quite lovely. So this is a
dog carrying an oxygen tank for a kid.
There's a set of memes and the memes are also cultural markers. In order to get this, you have to
know, or it helps to know that this is ScumbagSteve, that this image is repeated over and over
with different mottos, sometimes just the hat is used. And you don't -- often you can't get the
joke if you don't already know the joke, and that's a sign of an echo chamber, of a cultural -there's also the counterpart of this, which is Good Guy Greg, the whole series of these.
There's this which is much funnier if you know what the meme is, and the meme -- anybody
know what this meme is? First World problems. So you see these are all like randomly chosen
memes, who knows. You see her, you see this exact picture, and you know that it's going to be a
First World problem.
Here's another one. So not only is that one of the ways that humor forms, it's also a sign of an
echo chamber, of, you know, they exclude. If you don't know this, you're excluded from the
group that has its own language that serves much the same purpose.
TIL. Any of the readers here -- I'll just tell you. Today I learned. Right? This prefaces a
comment. Today I learned dadadadada something. Fixed that for you, which is take somebody's
remark, make a small change, usually hilarious, to improve it, to fix it for you. IAMA, which is
what I want to talk about, is a -- it's I am a blank. I am -- well, I'll give you an example in a
moment. And then often going with IAMA is ask me anything or ask me almost anything,
AMAA.
So I'm bringing this up in part because the language indicates an echo chamber, but I also want
to look at IAMAs because they are the opposite of an echo chamber.
So you go through -- there's a pretty randomly chosen set of IAMAs. They are I'm a student at
an evangelical Christian seminary. That is not an atheist, thus an outsider to reddit. Reddit is -a big part of the ethos is acceptance, however. It's really quite lovely. It's one of the reasons I
like it so much. There is a strong ethos of acceptance. So that person agrees to do an IAMA, he
or she will be asked questions that are honest, that are arched, that difficult, and so long as the
person answer in a way that is honest, at least seems honest, that person will be accorded a great
deal of respect.
Any comment may spin out a fairly hilarious thread making fun of the person, but still that's part
of the -- so in this case somebody moved to Africa five years ago and then you get these long,
long threads.
So lessons from reddit. It is an echo chamber. But it's only because it's an echo chamber that it's
able to -- I'm not going to put this well. All right. How about let me put it like this. A new
Supreme Court ruling is issued and is somewhat technical and I don't know what to make of it,
but, you know, I'm political, I'm a Boston Jew, so now you know everything about -- basically
everything, but everything about my politics, completely stereotypical.
So this ruling comes in and, I don't know, what does it mean? What does it mean? Or it's an
FCC, I don't know. I could go to a group with whom I thoroughly disagree and see what they
make of it. But I'm not going to do that. That's hugely -- at least not initially, that's hugely
inefficient. I'm going to go to one of the sites that I trust whose values and opinions are basically
like mine so that they can explain it to me. Because that's how understanding works. You have
to have this huge context with which you're intimately familiar in order to be able to learn
something new.
We are not the way the Enlightenment philosophers would like us to be. We're not capable of
working all the way down to the bare metal and starting with no beliefs and evaluate, that's not
how we work. That's not how understanding works. Understanding is the assimilation of
something slightly different to a context that is so familiar that it's actually quite literally our
world.
However, given that, if you are in an environment that feels safe enough, that is enough of an
echo chamber, if it has the will, as reddit does, and I admire it for that, it can open up windows in
that echo chamber and say, well, actually we would like to hear from the seminarian. We would
like to hear from the person who hates Ron Paul or thinks whatever.
We are interested -- we want to -- we would like to hear from a racist. We're not going to
become racist. We're very settled in our beliefs. Or homophobes. But because it is that much of
an echo chamber, we're able to open up a window and be able to engage in exactly the sort of
dialogue that the Enlightenment philosophers would like.
The escape from echo chambers occurs within echo chambers. Not all echo chambers do that,
however. In fact, you can't have a culture without it being, in essence, an echo chamber.
All right. Third example is, and I hope I'll be fast on this, is the faster-than-light neutrino
controversy, which in the old days you would have gotten your news from the article in The New
York Times. Oh, that's interesting, that was very -- and depending on what level of expertise
you're at, you'll -- very likely you would have said either, oh, I don't -- I don't understand that,
but, too bad, you're reading a paper output, you can't get any further, or you'd be so deeply into
physics that you would say, well, I'd like to know much, much more. I understand all that, I'd
like to know much, much more. But you were out of luck again because you only had this
seven-inch article or whatever it is that they ran that day, and you then you'd be dependent upon
having some other -- that's obviously not how it works now.
So the findings -- you know the faster-than-light neutrino stuff, right? And so these findings
were posted on archive.org, which has no editorial vetting. Anybody, any scientist with any
standing can post anything there, and they do, with no peer review, just put up in a public space.
And, by the way, this example comes from Michael Nielsen, whose book, Reinventing
Discovery, is really good. It's not in his book, but when he talks he gives this example
sometimes.
So within a couple months there were 80 other papers posted there and it spread out all across the
Web, with people coming forward with good ideas, with bad ideas, with more data, with bad
data, with stupid ideas, and with lots and lots of explanations. I actually think this is a really
important part of this type of network that evolves, so that wherever you were in the knowledge
chain, you don't have the math, that would be mean, so you need a very slow explanation or
you're a senior physicist somewhere and you need to -- people will explain it at every level, the
entire ecology of -- the entire ecosystem of knowledge got filled in.
And so this, this Web was amazingly valuable and did not go through peer review at all.
Because had it gone through peer review, a year and a half later this paper would have been
published and six months after that there would have been some letters to the editor. It doesn't
scale. Peer review has many things going for it, but it's really hard to scale it.
A lot of the open access journals are peer reviewed and they have figured out ways to scale it, at
least far beyond what it was. But as a cultural phenomenon, this developed knowledge way
faster, involves many more people, is more likely to surface bugs than the old system was.
And it depends upon this notion of knowledge. This only has value insofar as these nodes
disagree with one another or are different from one another in all the different ways. Sometimes
it's flat-out disagreement, sometimes it's a difference of emphasis or an explanation.
These networks of knowledge only have value insofar as they contain difference, which is pretty
much the opposite of our old idea of knowledge, which was we only know it once we have
driven difference and disagreement out. If we don't yet know, if there's disagreement about the
effect of tax increases on the economy, we say, well, we don't know. We don't know yet. It's
only when we have driven out disagreement that we were willing to say that we knew something.
In network knowledge, the disagreement is an integral part of it. So I'm not saying that books
are going away, I'm not saying that Darwin would be replaced by a series of tweets, although I
think he probably would have been tweeting from the Beagle: Discovered -- what do you make
of these birds? They have different -- these finches have different beaks on different islands, I
wonder what's up with that.
So he probably would have been doing some tweeting. But the book itself is this wonderful
long-form work. It doesn't resolve into tweets.
But it does seem pretty clear to me, and if you disagree, you'll let me know, that books as a form,
long-form writing, won't go away, but it's no longer at the top of the pyramid, so to speak.
And, in fact, long-form works, which people will continue to write, I'm sure, will have value the
way the rest of our knowledge products have value, which is to be embedded in a vibrant web of
people writing, explaining, disagrees, extending it to new areas, getting it wrong and right. That
it's the network itself that is where the knowledge is and the primary object of knowledge, not
any of the nodes.
So I am not actually going to be able to answer this question, is this good or bad or is it making
us smarter or stupider. That's too -- by the time I figured out what that meant, you wouldn't have
figured it out, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
But I do want to point this out, that if you look at the properties of traditional knowledge and
then look at the properties of network knowledge, and these are properties according to my
hypothesis of both network knowledge and of the network itself, because the overall hypothesis
is this McCluen [phonetic] sort of hypothesis that knowledge is taking on the properties of its
medium, these properties are not properties simply of knowledge -- not properties simply of the
Internet but are actually properties of being a human being in a vast world, vast confusing world
with very inadequate, you know, equipment for dealing with it, three pounds of sort of gray
twisted flesh.
And so I don't know. I want to punt on the question whether network knowledge is truer about
the world. I think it is. I'm happy to have that argument. But leave that to the side for the
moment. I think it's nevertheless close to incontestable, but you'll tell me, that whether it's truer
about the world, network knowledge is certainly truer about the nature of knowledge itself. It is
more in line with the properties and characteristics of human beings with this tiny little cranium
joined together imperfectly. It's truer of our task together of trying to figure out what -- what's
going on.
So thank you very much.
[applause].
>> David Weinberger: No questions. Oh. Yes, sir.
>>: A question with respect to [inaudible] comments on, you know, news stories, articles, and
how that's changing the readers' perception about the world.
>> David Weinberger: It -- so it's certainly very different from -- we used to have letters to the
editor. And what's happened I think is not -- now there are letters to the editor for everything. I
think your point is something much more important than that, which is when you have letters to
the editor but there's no or little moderation, that anybody can contribute, you have a very
different idea about who -- what it takes to be on the public stage.
And so the old idea -- and you see this, by the way, in the entertainment industry as well, but the
old idea that the knowers who were the people who made it through the very narrow apertures of
the broadcast media, including books as a form of broadcast, you had the idea that those were
special people. Those were sort of -- they were apart -- they're not like -- you know, they're not
like you. They are the people who are on TV who are in a position to pronounce.
That's pretty much gone. We now see just how little it takes to gain the public stage. And so the
mystique of their being a class of authorities is to a large degree gone. Just gone. For better and
for worse. Overall I think it's really good. On the other hand, it's now much easier to believe
false things than it ever was.
Does this accord with ->>: Yeah, I was just [inaudible] everyone's a potential journalist [inaudible] what I find, I find
the comments on news articles almost as fascinating and sometimes as insightful and give me a
different perspective on an issue than the actual stories. So I'm looking [inaudible] I use it to
gauge public opinion [inaudible] what other people think about this. So I'm wondering, you
know, how is that -- how is that impacting the way people are, you know, consuming knowledge
on the Internet. You know, is there -- what's the ->> David Weinberger: You know, I think it's very hard to -- it's very hard to generalize because
comments are so different.
>>: Yeah. There's a lot of crap.
>> David Weinberger: There's a lot of crap. But if there's a lot of crap, it probably means your
comment system is broken. There's a lot of social engineering, which sounds like a horrible
thing, but I just mean, you know, tuning in order to get the sort of discussion that you are aiming
for.
There's a lot of that that needs to be done. And people who have crap comments very likely need
to tune. It could be as simple as putting up a statement about what sort of -- or something more
complex, you know, moderation or thumbs up and thumbs down.
Sometimes -- so it -- one of the things I find interesting is the difference in some site -- a way of
classifying site. So some sites the comments are the audience jeering at or applauding, but
usually jeering, the people who are in the position to talk. So there's some anointed class
perceived and they're being -- the groundlings are having their revenge. And in other sites it's -there's a greater acceptance that at this site the audience is like an unconference, everybody is an
expert. And so the conversation can be far more constructive, but, nevertheless, in any case
people feel that the comments are not commenting on them, rather they are -- it's an us that is
developing an idea. And depending on how you set up your site will determine which sort of
comments you're going to get.
>>: This question is online. I think you sort of answered it. Let me ask it. Based on your work
and maybe your interests, are you finding that religion, slash, ancient texts can give you a more
accurate understanding of the true nature of the world than the Internet with all the opinions
[inaudible] than just the facts presented.
>> David Weinberger: Aye yai yai. So do I find that religion and ancient text give us a more
accurate, truer idea of the world.
Huh. For whatever reason, I do think that there's value in history, in reading history, which I'm
not going to -- you know, I have nothing interesting to say about it.
I do find this remarkable correspondence between -- which I think is a peculiarity of how I look
at things, not an actual correspondence, between what I find of value on the Internet and
elements of Jewish practice.
I'm a nonobservant Jew. I know lots of very observant Jews, starting with my wife. And the -as I understand it, as a semioutsider, the Jewish attitude towards the text is that it is -- it can
never be understood simply. It doesn't simply speak, it always has to be interpreted and it has to
be interpreted through a community. In the case of Jewish tradition, it has to be interpreted by a
community with reference to a history of community interpretation.
So it's very self-reflexive in that regard, but for me captures something essential about the nature
of truth. That it's social, that it is not a simple reading of the world. You can't simply read the
Book of Nature, you've got to argue about it, interpret it, and recognize it. It's always an
interpretation. And that that discussion either has historical roots or is floating freely without
recognizing that it has historical roots.
There's a book called [inaudible] in the Internet, which I hesitate to say is not all that good. It's -half of it is good. Half of it is saying what I just said and does it better and he knows the
[inaudible] and I don't. And the other half of his story is about his grandmother, which I didn't
find all that interesting. But it's a thin little book.
So I'm not sure that responsive, but that's the best I can do to really -- difficult question.
>>: I'd like to hear your thoughts on how people manage social networks from their own
perspective. So to explain my question a little bit more, I generally find that almost every single
tool in life has pros if you know how to use it right and cons if you don't know how to use it
right. Okay. So, for example, smart people will use Facebook as a way of connecting to the
right people that they want to stay connected with and so on and so forth. Right? Dumb people
will probably visit it every two minutes, right, and see what everyone in the world is doing and
not do things that they're supposed to do [inaudible]. Right?
That said ->> David Weinberger: We'll take that as a hypothesis.
[laughter].
>>: I mean, I can go on with examples. Right? Somebody found something hairy on a
cantaloupe that they bought from Safeway or some grocery store, right?
>> David Weinberger: No, that was real.
>>: And -- and there were 150 comments on it, whose hair was it, what color was it, what color
was it, was it really a hair or not. And when I saw that, I'm like, oh, my gosh, so many
[inaudible]. The point is even though you may think that almost everyone in the room probably
thinks that they belong in the smart camp and they use things more for what they want to use it
for.
All that said, we all are very, very, very tempted to do the dumb thing. And I will admit that I
don't visit it every two minutes, but I do visit it every two hours and I get incredibly frustrated
with myself, why do you have to visit it every two hours. Why. Like are you looking to see
what people are commenting on the part that you posted, or sometimes you post something that
you think is profound and you're looking for people's comments or approvals or whatnot, and so
you visit every two hours. You actually only spend two minutes on people's comments
[inaudible] and you spend ten minutes on checking out some random stuff.
So how do -- how do you get around a problem and start disciplining yourself?
[laughter].
>>: Which will become increasingly important, right, as you overload ->> David Weinberger: So I don't know. I have different sorts of issues with the Internet. I -this I think is fairly common, but I will often get to a site and forget why I got there or how I got
there. I would look at the browser history, but I don't -- I was going to do something. I know I
was looking at something, and I can't remember, in part because I'm old and my brain is fading,
so I now -- I use a lot of sticky notes. I try to remember -- I try to write down what it is I'm
going to do, because I know in literally goldfish time, in two and a half seconds, I'm going to
forget that I was looking up something.
So a couple of things. First is I think the overall message lesson is that -- so I'm going to put this
insanely positively. The world is way more interesting than anybody ever told us. We were told
that what's interesting is what comes through the media, the carefully filtered. And, no, it turns
out we are an incredibly curious species and that the world is insanely interesting; that
everything is interesting if looked at at the right level of detail.
And so we do that, and we can spend the rest of our lives. So I'm not so sure -- that's a very
positive way of putting frittering away time.
The second thing to say is Allison Head is a researcher, the University of Washington, I think.
She's currently at the Berkman Center. And PIL is the project. I can't remember what it stands
for. But you can, you know, look it up. And so she did some research recently looking at -- with
permission, of course -- looking at what students were actually doing on their laptops when they
were in the library during exam time. So this is field research, field anthropology. And she
discovered they actually were managing their distractions really well. They had a variety -- so
she looked at how many applications they have opened and how many windows they have open
and tabs and what they're doing. And she discovered that they had a variety of techniques that
all work out to basically the same thing and are all pretty effective, which is they postpone the
pleasure of checking Facebook. That was the main. In some cases they would time themselves
and only allow themselves to look after doing 20 minutes of work or they would hide it, they
would minimize the window or they would -- but they had -- because exams are coming up.
Self-selected group, they're in the library studying, okay, so that's important. But, nevertheless,
they were coming up with techniques.
And if you went around this room, I bet you'd find a different technique for each person. I use
sticky notes. I know people who use -- there's a program called Write or Die, I believe. It's a
very simple word processor. And there are two settings. The normal setting, if you -- you start it
up and you don't enter keystrokes after some small amount of time, it will start flashing at you
saying type, type, type, type. And in the extreme setting, if you don't enter, it starts erasing
irrevocably what you've done. So I had a friend who was using that to sort of get past whatever
distractions that he had.
There's also this -- I'm sure many of you use this program that was -- I don't remember the name
of it. Fred -- what's his name -- damn it. Grad student wrote it. And I think it's called Freedom.
It may be a Mac program. But you set it up and it turns off Internet access for whatever period
of time you specify so you can't check your precious Facebook.
Yeah.
>>: When you have a list of properties [inaudible] and so on, my question, I'll put it in the
context of -- let's just take innovation, for instance. Is there a time when you're actually
ambulating one side and the other side in different time frames and what are the signs [inaudible]
one to another? And I can give different examples from [inaudible] tourism or music.
>> David Weinberger: Just give me an example of the slides, please. I'm not sure what ->>: Okay. The lists that you [inaudible].
>> David Weinberger: Between the old and the new?
>>: Yeah, old and the new.
>> David Weinberger: Yeah. No -- yeah.
>>: Like tourism, for instance, you either look on where you want to go, let's just take France,
and then here's Paris, everything else, and then you go there and you want to do the nontouristy
things and you end up doing, talking, looking online, which also seems to be a form of curation,
it's just different people than ->> David Weinberger: Yes. Yes. We do. It's a really good point. We do vary -- we swing
back and forth and we focus and we lose focus.
The Library Innovation Lab that I codirect has a project/product, well, I'll say project called
ShelfLife which is a way of browsing libraries. So you see all the works it -- it's a visual
browser. And it allows you to focus in on -- the idea is it'll let you focus -- you're doing some
research, you need to focus in, focus down, find exactly what you want.
But when you find what you want, you probably -- or you may want to branch out and see the
other stuff around it. You may want to be distracted in a useful way. And that this rhythm is
unpredictable, but -- and so you always have to give people the access to go this way or go this
way. But it's important that you give them both of those.
And I suspect the same is true in almost every -- in every environment.
I'll go back to Allison Head, because similar to this other research that she's done about how
students -- you get a paper assignment from your professor, professor says quite frequently you
may not use Wikipedia. They all do. Because the very first thing they want to do is get a sense
of the scope of the topic, and Wikipedia is really good at that for a lot of instances. You go there
and you say I don't know anything about...well, now I got an encyclopedia article, and now that I
have that, you don't put it in your bibliography because your professor, don't use Wikipedia, but
it enables you now to narrow down, get your topic, and begin digging in.
This sort of rhythmic -- it seems to be inevitable. Because there -- there isn't a set single way of
knowing the world or interacting with it. And as curious creatures with emergent behavior, we
need tools that very fluidly let us do both, except in the most stringent of cases, the real outlier
cases.
But the rest of the time we want all those possibilities and we want to be able to direct ourselves
that way because that's -- you know, that's pretty much what it means to be an agent, to be a
person. I don't know.
>>: I was wondering, you were talking about the echo chambers earlier, and not quite sure how
to phrase this, but how do you think -- because there's echo chambers even here. Like some
people [inaudible] people don't, you know, and that's a community of sorts and there's
communities all over the place. But what I'm more interested in trying to understand is what
your thoughts are around how that might impact how we educate our children.
>> David Weinberger: Okay. I'm going to try to be really brief, and it's not because I have so
much to say, I have so little to say. I'm still going to try to be brief. I'm going to do you that
favor.
We -- so this is an unfair characterization I'm about to give. But we have a model that we
thankfully failed to execute on in various knowledge-seeking enterprises, and sometimes in
libraries, sometimes in the educational system, where we -- the paradigm is there's a lot of wrong
ideas in the world. This is actually how knowledge itself came to be in the West. It was reaction
against hearing lots of different opinions about how to run the state and only some of those could
be true and that special class of justifiable true belief is knowledge.
We still believe that. We believe it more than ever because there is so much crap on the Internet,
so many wrong things on the Internet.
So we have this model that the aim should be to move people away from the shiny objects that
are wrong and get them to the authorities frequently who are dull, condescending, patronizing
men, and we get them to the authorities and now they'll believe what's true.
And it's not a terrible model -- well, yeah, it is a terrible model actually. And I think that one of
the things that may be happening, and I see some indication of this in libraries and in the
educational system, is that it's -- you need to do that, you need to be able to steer people away
from falsehood and two more reliable sources, but that's not enough. That would be -- in the old
days that was the ending point. That's the book that you read and now you're done.
Now I think it's becoming an important part of knowledge seeking and advising others in
knowledge seeking to not just do that but then also to bring people to the reasonable
disagreements and differences.
I mean, good textbooks have always tried to do this. They'll have in a box, you know, people
who disagree with this theory and then sort of marginalize. But at least it's there. Getting
students, learners to be familiar with, comfortable with, and critical thinkers about the continuing
disagreements that make life worthwhile, I think that's a really important part of it.
So it's simply steering to authority is not enough anymore. It's not even doing the person a favor.
>>: [inaudible] so there's part of this about the facts aspect as well, so you have some facts
appear to be more immutable than others, and then there are other facts that probably to the
gentleman's comment up there that was unattributed, facts are my facts, and there's the facts I'm
going to judge you on. Is that something that we as a society need to learn, or is that world-like
culture? Or how ->> David Weinberger: Oh. So worldwide is the way to [inaudible]. The situation with facts is
really complex. Part of what I leave out, what I've left out in talking about them, is the huge
growth in the commoditization of facts which is generally a good thing. So almanacs in the 19th
century, commoditized facts of the journalists -- originally journalists could just sit there and not
have to run off to the government sources, look up population of Cleveland and there it is. You
know, $1.79, you have yourself an almanac. And it was great.
And we now do that more than ever because we have the Internet, and most of what we deal
with, I think all of us believe that we're capable of finding actual facts rather than being fooled, at
least regularly being fooled.
And we actually had this up a level as well. It's not just facts, but with Wikipedia as a
standardized source and all of the other sorts of sources that are also available, but we'll stick
with Wikipedia for the moment, it's not just facts, but it's sort of encyclopedia-level information
about things. You want to know about which one was William the Conqueror? Now you know.
Just like an almanac, except you're not getting facts, you're getting that story.
And that's a tremendous -- we all know this is an amazing thing. We do this all the time. IMDb
by itself is incredible. You know, we've got whole bunches of things like that.
So it's not simply -- I mean, that's an important part of what's going on with facts. We have more
than ever, they're commoditized, they're fairly reliable, they're getting more so. It's an amazing
advance in our culture.
At the same time, the facts that are interesting, that are in dispute, that we use in order to support
disputes, those are -- those are the ones that we're not going to -- that are not going to do what we
wanted them to do.
And the final thing that I guess I want to say at the moment about that is facts have very brief
history. It's not like our belief in facts goes back thousands of years and we're -- as we turn away
from the belief that facts are going to be enough to win -- to change people's minds, it's not as if
we're betraying thousands of years of Western culture, and Western culture has failed, Western
culture was -- in a profound way was antifact, not antireality, not antitruth, not antiknowledge,
but antifact for thousands of years.
Knowledge was considered to be from the time of Aristotle to be knowledge of universals, of
what's greater than mere facts, what's before us in our sensory. Animals can see what's in front
of them. That's not interesting. It's the human capability we believed to be able to see beyond
the particulars, to see the universals. And it's only with Bacon -- sorry, Francis, not, you know,
that the idea that facts could be used usefully to get at those universals which were themselves
the proper objects of knowledge, that's only a few hundred years and it's only in the 19th century
that facts began to play a role in the social sphere as that which decides arguments.
A very quick example. It's actually not just an example, it's how it happened. In the 19th
century in England the justification for the hideous social division was moral. So that was the
claim, that the poor deserved to be poor, they are lazy, they're drunkards, they're dishonest, so of
course they're poor. Yeah. Screw 'em.
And they were screwed. It was, oh, please, are you telling me that it's -- that a nine-year-old
skinny kid doesn't like being put into a seven-inch-square chimney to scrape out the soot?
Please. It's either that or he's going to be out pickpocketing.
That was -- that was literally the argument. It was a moral argument. And the use of facts to
contradict that was only at the turn of the -- at the beginning of the 1800s where for various
reasons reformers decided, well, actually maybe there is some medical evidence that these
nine-year-olds who are coughing up soot are not really as healthy as the ones who are playing
outside. I don't know. Maybe.
And so they set about actually gathering facts. That's wonderful. I'm in favor of that. But we
should recognize it's not a part of our DNA, it's not even a long-term part of our culture. It's
something that arose a couple hundred years ago, and within 50 years, I'd say 40 years of it, of
the growth of this, we already had people like Dickens making fun of fact-based governance.
Facts, facts, facts, as Mr. Gradgrind, you know, you can't base policy on facts, that's inhumane.
So this is not as big a shift as it might be. Did I say I was going to be short?
>> Amy Draves: [inaudible] so thank you so very much.
>> David Weinberger: Oh. I'm so sorry. Thank you very much. And don't forget to bundle up
and put on your cleats for heading out into that snow and ice.