from my reading -too big to know

Darwin spent five years sailing on a small boat, Galileo defied a Pope, and Madame Curie handled ra- dioactive materials, all in pursuit of knowledge as the most profound of human goals.

That is what knowledge has meant in our culture, and it has little to do with the middle layer of a made-up pyramid that shears knowledge of all but its most prosaic, get-’er-done utility.

Plato gave us the abiding formulation: Among all the opinions spouted, the subset that counts as knowledge consists of the ones that not only are true but also are believed for justifiable reasons.

That sec- ond qualification was necessary because some people hold opinions that are true but only by accident: If you think Socrates is innocent of corrupting the young because you like the way he drapes his toga, your opinion is true but does not constitute knowledge.

Hunches and guesses that turn out to be right also aren’t knowledge.

But we’ve paid a hidden price: We have raised the bar so high that we have some- times excluded ideas that were nevertheless worth considering, and false beliefs—once accepted—can be hard to dislodge even after they have been found out.

Alvin Toffler introduced the idea of information overload to the general public in 1970 in his book Future Shock.12 He positioned 5  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 6 TOO BIG TO KNOW information overload as a follow-on to sensory overload:13 When our environment throws too many sensations at us—say, at a Grateful Dead concert with a light show and the mixed scents of a thousand sticks of incense—our brains can get confused, causing a “blurring of t

Alvin Toffler introduced the idea of information overload to the general public in 1970 in his book Future Shock.12 He positioned 5  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 6 TOO BIG TO KNOW information overload as a follow-on to sensory overload:13 When our environment throws too many sensations at us—say, at a Grateful Dead concert with a light show and the mixed scents of a thousand sticks of incense—our brains can get confused, causing a “blurring of t

14 But what happens when we go up a level from mere sensation, and our poor little brains are buf- feted by information?

15 “Sanity, itself, thus hinges” on avoiding infor- mation overload.16 A term, a fear, and a bestseller were born.

15 “Sanity, itself, thus hinges” on avoiding infor- mation overload.16 A term, a fear, and a bestseller were born.

In 1685, French scholar Adrien Bail- let wrote: “We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following cen- turies fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”

In 1685, French scholar Adrien Bail- let wrote: “We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following cen- turies fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.”

In our age, informa- tion overload has blown past every dire prediction, with the zettabyte study from UCSD zooming past the previous estimate of 0.3 zettabytes 8  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 9 KNOWLEDGE OVERLOAD from a study just two years earlier.27 The difference between 0.3 and 3.6 zettabytes is ten times the total number of grains of sand on the earth—although these studies probably only chart an unimaginable gap in how they measure inform

As the amount of information has overloaded the overload, we have not proportionately suffered from information anxiety, information tremors, or information but- terflies-in-the-stomach.

Thanks to you, and to the expert sources to whom you look, such as journals that preview forthcoming titles, li- brary patrons don’t see the weird cookbooks and the badly written per- sonal reminiscences that didn’t make the cut, just as the readers of newspapers don’t see the crazy letters to the editor written in crayon.

Thanks to you, and to the expert sources to whom you look, such as journals that preview forthcoming titles, li- brary patrons don’t see the weird cookbooks and the badly written per- sonal reminiscences that didn’t make the cut, just as the readers of newspapers don’t see the crazy letters to the editor written in crayon.

Thanks to you, and to the expert sources to whom you look, such as journals that preview forthcoming titles, li- brary patrons don’t see the weird cookbooks and the badly written per- sonal reminiscences that didn’t make the cut, just as the readers of newspapers don’t see the crazy letters to the editor written in crayon.

The chaff that doesn’t make it through the digital 10  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 11 KNOWLEDGE OVERLOAD filter is still the same number of clicks away from you, but what makes it through is now a single click away.

Second, the abundance revealed to us by our every encounter with the Net tells us that no filter, no matter how social and newfangled, is going to reveal the complete set of knowledge that we need.

So, when 13  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 14 TOO BIG TO KNOW the US Patent Office was frustrated by how long its beleaguered staff was taking to research patent applications, it started a pilot project that enlists “citizen-experts” to find prior instances of the claimed inven- tions, across disciplinary and professional lines.

So, when 13  9700465021420-text_rev_Layout 1 10/19/11 10:51 AM Page 14 TOO BIG TO KNOW the US Patent Office was frustrated by how long its beleaguered staff was taking to research patent applications, it started a pilot project that enlists “citizen-experts” to find prior instances of the claimed inven- tions, across disciplinary and professional lines.

To cite your credentials generally would count against you, and if you don’t know what you’re talking about, a creden- tial would do you no good.

34 His success comes pre- cisely by contravening much of what we have taken for granted about knowledge.

For example: Rather than hiring a handful of full-time experts who could be marketed as representing the unique pinnacle of industry knowledge, Hidary has built a network that has strength be- cause of the variety of people in it.

In June 2009, Noveck convened fifteen people in the DC boardroom of the Ameri- can Association for the Advancement of Science, so that the AAAS could combine its expertise with that of the public to provide better advice on issues facing executive-branch agencies.

Two of the most staid and prestigious institutions in Amer- ica—the White House and the American Association for the Advancement of Science—recognize that traditional ways of channel- ing and deploying expertise are insufficient to meet today’s challenges.