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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.