Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Machine-Made Blindness

This is a rambling, discursive, facile presentatiοn. But what is it really meant to be? A meditation? A sales document? A popularised academic dissertation? It has lots of jargon like ‘long-form thinking’, and ‘book-shaped knowledge’ that suggest it is meant to be hip, the latest thing (in 2010) in intellectual cool. But its contribution to what it claims as its territory - epistemology - is difficult to detect.

The book starts by quoting the former business guru, Russell Ackoff, who had a lot of interesting things to say about the difference between information and knowledge. But the author apparently missed one of Ackoff’s often used quips that “Leibniz was the last man to know everything.” This is important because it pulls the rug out of Weinberger’s argument, that the technology of the internet has made fundamental changes in what constitutes factual knowledge.

Leibniz, of course, was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and knew nothing of information technology (although he did flirt with the idea if a ‘reckoning engine’). But he knew a great deal about what might constitute reality. Essentially, reality is what all of us know; and by extrapolation, are able to know. All of us, not some of us, not just the leaders or designated experts, or the prophetic seers or religious recipients of divine revelation. Knowledge, for Leibniz, was a joint human effort, and by his own theory even he could not comprehend it all.

So the problem of knowledge that Weinberger wants us to recognise is not something that arose with computers or communications technology. Weinberger’s conceit is not simply historically wrong, it is also practically misleading. It makes it appear that the solution to the epistemological problem - what constitutes a fact - is more and better use of technology.

One of Russell Ackoff’s teachers, Edgar Singer, had an insightfully laconic definition of a fact: “A fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.” The circularity is its genius. It is a condensation of all Leibniz’s philosophy in a single sentence. And it has several implications which Weinberger might beneficially notice.

The first of these implications is there is no method, process, or procedure by which facts can be verified. Technology may help proliferate purported facts, but it does nothing to filter them. Such filters are judgments made extra-technologically, as it were. This has always been so, even when the technology involved was only one’s unassisted eyes and ears.*

We pay attention to what’s important. The judgment about what’s important is a mysterious cultural phenomenon which may be made more mysterious by technology but certainly isn’t made any easier.

Importance is a synonym for value. Values are interests. Interests, therefore, are inevitably an element of what constitutes a fact. The implication here is that agreement about facts is predicated on agreement about what is valuable. In other words, facts are political. And politics cannot be reduced to a machine algorithm, which must presume an existing political consensus.

Creating political consensus is much harder than designing information technology. However there is one principle which is essential for both: any attempt to restrict participation in either will result in a distortion of reality and failure. Most of what Weinberger has to say leads to that brief conclusion. This is not too big to know. Only his obsession with technology blinds him to it.

*An example, P.K. Dick more effectively explored the same issue fictionally a half century before Weinberger: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Postscript 27May19: As if by magic, this showed up today, making the point more concisely than I have:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-2...

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