Too Big to Know

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

“True enough, we have internal experts we can draw on,” says Cenkl, “but we’ve also realized that we need to change the way we present ourselves. It’s not necessarily that the MITRE person is the smartest person in the room. We’ve decided that the model needs to evolve so that we become the brokers of expertise. Our value is that we understand the

The best problem solvers tend to be similar; therefore, a collection of the best problem solvers performs little better than any one of them individually. A collection of random, but intelligent, problem solvers tends to be diverse. This diversity allows them to be collectively better.5

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

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.

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.

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

But now that our medium can handle far more ideas and information, and now that it is a connective medium (ideas to ideas, people to ideas, people to people), our strategy is changing. And that is changing the very shape of knowledge.

Fifth, we have taken long-form works as the great achievement of human knowing because they have the luxury of developing ideas to completion. But now that ideas are freed of bound pages for their embodiment, it turns out that long-form works were never nearly long enough.