David Weinberger on Too Big to Know

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2012

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

David Weinberger of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of Too Big to Know, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book--how knowledge and data and our understanding of the world around us are being changed by the internet. Weinberger discusses knowledge and how it is attained have changed over time, particularly with the advent of the internet. He argues the internet has dispersed the power of authority and expertise. And he discusses whether the internet is making us smarter or stupider, and the costs and benefits of being able to tailor information to one's own interests and biases.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is February 7th, 2012, and my guest is David Weinberger, a senior
0:43.5	researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His latest
0:48.4	book is Too Big To Know. David, welcome back to Econ Talk. Hi. Our subject for today is
0:55.6	Knowledge, which is what your book is about. How is knowledge and our understanding of knowledge
1:00.0	changed because of the internet, and how is it changed over time? You start early on in the book,
1:06.6	you give a brief history of empirical knowledge, an expertise, and you use Malthus as an example
1:13.0	of someone whose work had to change. Can you talk about that to start us off? Yes, I'm
1:18.8	so the question is whether or what role facts play because in the modern world these days, we
1:27.3	continue to have a hope that facts will settle arguments. This is put really well by Senator
1:36.7	Moynihan when he said everybody's entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, which
1:42.2	is sort of a lovely way of putting an old idea, at least an enlightenment idea, and I think
1:49.7	you can trace it back way further than that, where the idea is that we seem to have lots of
1:55.9	disagreements, there's lots of opinions in the world, lots of ideas, and we argue about
2:03.0	them, but it says Moynihan, the role of facts themselves. If we just sit down and look
2:10.3	at the way the world is, look at the facts, reasonable people can come together, and knowledge
2:14.4	will feel us, will help us pass these divides. The knowledge that in particular, in this
2:21.8	case, looks at facts, as if facts are the irrefutable foundation of knowledge. And so much as I like
2:31.1	facts, and I believe in facts, and I think some things are true and some things are false,
	...

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