Too Big to Know

To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.

A species that gets answers and can then stop asking is able to free itself for new inquiries.

Facts are facts. It’s a fact that polio vaccine is effective and it’s a fact that Cancer the constellation has nothing to do with tumors. But the idea that the house of knowledge is built on a foundation of facts is not itself a fact. It’s an idea with a history that is now taking a sharp turn.

On the Net, every fact has an equal and opposite reaction.

First, there is a right degree of diversity. Too little diversity and you end up thinking it’s a great idea to invade Vietnam. Too much diversity and you have citizens haranguing you about Hawaiian birth certificates when you’re trying to come up with standardized formats for open government data.

Now if you want to know something, you go online. If you want to make what you’ve learned widely accessible, you go online. Paper will be with us for a long time, but the momentum is clearly with the new, connected digital medium. But this is not merely a shift from displaying rectangles of text on a book page to displaying those rectangles on a sc

Because of the economics of paper, facts were relatively rare and gem-like because there wasn’t room for a whole lot of them. Because of the physics of paper, once a fact was printed, it stayed there on the page, uncontradicted, at least on that page.

It seems we love diversity until we see what it actually looks like.

Faced with the fact that there is too much to know, our strategy has been to build a system of stopping points for knowledge. It’s an efficient response, well-suited to the paper medium by which we preserved and communicated knowledge.

Even if the smartest person in the room is the room itself, the room does not magically make all who enter it smart.