Knowing What We Know by Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester’s brilliance as a writer is fairly well known at this point. The author of dozens of books and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen has another gem on his hands with Knowing What We Know, a whirlwind of prose, storytelling, research, anecdotes, and philosophizing on how we — humans — have learned and passed down knowledge over the millennia, what we are doing and not doing with that knowledge currently, and the perils and challenges ahead as we grapple with Artificial Intelligence and the ramifications of not really having to learn anything anymore. Winchester theorizes that, for some, this might actually be a good thing because the time we don’t have to spend writing out long division or heading to the library to find books on the causes of The Great War might be time that we can actually use to think — something that we don’t do a whole lot of anymore either! Although our lives are easier in a lot of ways because of all the information that is available to us, the way we learn and pass along knowledge has changed drastically over the last few decades, when in the past there were only a small handful of major changes — the invention of writing, paper, and the printing press, to name a few — that really, truly changed everything for everyone around the world. Now, knowledge is available in milliseconds at the stroke of a keyboard, and what we do with this unlimited knowledge has massive ramifications for our future. Knowing What We Know is a dazzling non-fiction page turner that reads almost like a novel, and Winchester has a knack for forcing you to learn while at the same time making you think about what you are learning. An author for the ages, and here’s hoping his next masterpiece comes out sooner rather than later.

• empiricism, to learn because of an experience
• until the 18th century, most shoes were agnostic as to left and right, being straight and so quite interchangeable
• this book seeks to tell the story of how knowledge has been passed from sources into human minds, and how the means of passage has evolved
• what is knowledge?
• from the transitive verb ‘to know’
• the state or condition of knowing fact or truth
• Plato gave the title Theaetetus, which has Socrates arguing about what knowledge actually is
• first consideration of such matters in all of human existence thus far
• justified true belief JTB
• epistemology — study of knowledge
• is true, is believed to be true, the person who believes to be true is justified in believing it to be so JTB
• a priori descriptive knowledge stems from deduction and reason and theory
• a posteriori descriptive knowledge, observation and experience
• troubling matter, that of belief
• 18th century, Enlightenment, ancient beliefs crumbled, certain knowledge became less certain — great Lisbon earthquake of 1755
• Voltaire challenged it was an act of God, geology, a knowledge based account of the nature of planet Earth
• unleashed from churchly teaching other kinds of rational thinking began to seep into and infect philosophy
• science in a sense took off
• knowledge was unhooked from faith
• DIKW: data, information, knowledge, wisdom
• indigenous peoples have similar wellsprings of ancient knowledge, knowledges
• how this knowledge is passed on, transmitted, diffused, taught, spread out into society
• archeology and anthropologists, passing on of knowledge by whatever means serves to quite distinct purposes
• helps in real time to ensure the health and survival of a community, it’s survivance
• maintain for the future the very coherence of the community
• earliest writings, reverence for our natural world faded quite quickly from public discourse
• education in its essence the business of any transmission of knowledge from one party to another
• teaching of children is where the story of the transfer of knowledge truly begins
• curiosity, one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind
• asking the who, the how, or the why
• serious acquisition of knowledge stems from our perception that something is new, complex, we are uncertain about what we will find out
• may well conflict with our existing biases and prejudices
• to a youngster, just about everything in every room is a surprise, and curiosity needs to be applied to reduce its threat
• to acquire knowledge is strongest between the ages of five and twelve
• temptation of the horizon — what might lie on the other side
• english word education hybrid of two Latin verbs, educare, to bring up, educere, to draw out and lead forth
• transmit the knowledge at their command in such a way as to nurture the coming generations, and shape it in approximate accordance with the adults own ideals of how to best live a life
• 3400 BC, craft of writing was invented, retention of records
• written phonetic language could explore and record the entire range of human emotion
• writing came to be a representation of the spoken language
• means of communicating knowledge
• tablet, cuneiform writing
• Babylon’s influence, math, sexagesimal base, number 60 being the local equivalent of our current numerical base of 10
• 60 minutes in an hour, multiple of 60 are used in measuring the longitude and latitude of our home planet
• knowledge spread, formally taught
• Mesopotamian schools were the world’s earliest
• some people would always rather believe than know, as belief gives solace, comfort, and assurance to millions
• practical knowledge, how and what, short term worth, knowledge of, culture and history and philosophy and art
• edifying and elevating, do not help with the immediate matters of the making and sustaining of human progress
• truly knowledgeable, the potentially wise, place for both kinds of knowing, belief and proof can have equal worth
• years towards the end of the Enlightenment, West performed and discovered and realized and invented and displayed composed and created so much
• benefits accrued in those places that were searching for them, by force or moral suasion, racial and condescending tones
• in China and Japan positioned themselves to beat the countries that had been the font of all of these ideas, beat them at their own game
• origins of SAT, Brigham, leading promoter of eugenics
• devised a series of tests to gauge the relative intelligence of American servicemen
• “Nordic race”, very much seen more intelligent
• math, reading, writing, SAT test was born
• paper published in 1930 Brigham agreed with his critics that the methods he employed in his testing of soldiers and which he publicized in his book were so deeply flawed
• growing consensus that past achievement is a better indicator and more reliable metric
• in the eyes of almost every other educated country in the world, American SAT is ridiculously easy
• National Higher Education Examination, Gaokao, in China
• very much a life changing event
• do well and your future in China is assured
• Latin word for the inner bark of a tree, liber, English word, library
• “Knowledge lies here”
• Iraqis, one by one, Isis fighters shut all the stores down, declaring them anathema to the cleansing spirit of jihad
• systematic ruin of Warsaw by the Nazis in late 1944
• wholesale arson of the entire national collections, the erasure of national memory by way of the destruction of books of any kind or age or value
• most famous library ever built was the Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt
• helped to launch the idea that gave us Dewey and a host of others systems of book classification
• libraries themselves proliferated within the Roman Empire
• named Alexa in honor of the Great Library — Amazon
• scroll eventually became a book, but it didn’t happen overnight
• some millions of books in the London library, you may take as many as you wish and keep them for as long as you require
• Dewey was a racist, anti-Semite, far too fond of the fondling and demeaning of grown women
• Diderot Encyclopedie of 1751, twenty year project distilled the Enlightenment
• influence on French society like few publications before or since
• prompted, inspired, provoked, triggered, even caused, The French Revolution
• logic and reason in sharp contrast to divinity and divine right, pitting equity against privilege, ability against inheritance
• give information, guide opinion
• lodestar was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, three Edinburgh folks
• it was British, book must be Brittanica
• set it apart was the length, seriousness, authority of its major individual essays, illustrious names, who composed them
• height of its powers, it employed some 2300 salesmen in North America, many of them selling books on commission for all of their working lives
• when it began to falter, it couldn’t keep up
• the race was unwinnable with the gush of new ideas, drowning the editors
• world of things — Greeks named a temple to the muses, a mouseion
• very idea of a museum is mostly a Western construct
• neocortex, ultimate long term storehouse of knowledge
• long term memory, implicit and explicit
• implicit, move or breathe or type, stored away deep down in the basal ganglia
• explicit, episodic, semantic, general knowledge of the world
• amygdala, hippocampus, processes, usually while you sleep
• sends them outward to permanent storage in the neocortex
• 1968, mother of all demos — electronics
• Vannevar Bush, 1945 essay, “As We May Think”, presaged the development of the Internet
• hypertext, written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper
• Wiki, derives from a Polynesian word, wikiwiki, what it means is VERY open, VERY publicly editable series of web pages
• Wikipedia got itself born
• creation eventually ended the long reign of book form encyclopedias, inaugurated today’s era of crowd sourced and wholly digitized knowledge
• idea of having the unelected masses provide the material for a mass curated source of knowledge has its roots in Victorian times
• 1857, what would become the Oxford English Dictionary
• OED and Encyclopedia, fickle and unpredictable wisdom of crowds
• papyrus, ultimately we get the world paper, major role in the early dissemination of knowledge
• safe to say the Chinese invented paper, Japanese improved and perfected it, Islamic world took to it with consummate enthusiasm, Europe which papermaking traveled, formed the basis for all subsequent written communication
• simple existence of paper positively encouraged the idea of writing
• new popularity of writing came a parallel enthusiasm for reading
• end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern, 1440, printing press
• true information revolution with the most profound and lasting of consequence
• inexpensive and fast mass production
• knowledge held in a single page could be distributed to millions
• democratize understanding
• printing and publishing industry was a commercial undertaking
• knowledge that a sufficient number of people want to consume, pay for, which allows however prints and publishes it to profit, to survive
• Gutenberg Bible, 15th century Germany, was not in any sense a popular book
• church was popular, Bible was not
• international appeal, commercial good sense
• book designed to primarily for those who could pay for it
• European Christian establishment
• books most likely to make money are the books that get published
• Gutenberg brought democracy to the spreading of knowledge
• allowing ordinary people everywhere to read, as and when they liked and when they liked
• all of a sudden, presses and printers were everywhere
• Luther, 1517
• crack that became the great schism that eventually divided the Catholic Church and set in motion the Protestant Reformation
• private, intramural canonical dispute between two Catholic prelates into a very public challenge to the pope’s hitherto unassailable authority
• press came to refer to the newspaper
• 17th century
• products of the printing press refers to the newspaper
• began in Germany
• news is that which is new
• in the beginning, this is what newspapers were destined to do
• note a few of the papers were scurrilious and unreliable, peddlers of falsehoods and propaganda
• 1890s, Hearst and Pulitzer
• competing attempts to boost circulation often led to monstrous journalistic excesses and blaring tabloid untruths
• NYTimes, helped swing American opinion very much in favor of the strike against Hussein, allied to Bush in the White House and the Pentagon the perfect reason to attack
• story was almost entirely wrong
• global village, planetary community wherein all knowledge becomes shared, is common
• in a sense that everyone knows about and therefore participates in everything that is happening the minute it happens
• invention of camera, wireless, TV, gave journalism the particular immense new powers and scope, would pave the way in time to an even greater revolution, Internet
• BBC, helped build in Britain a national intellectual narrative, lending to the population some sense of innate sophistication, some sense of an abiding cleverness, preexisting otherness
• Britons know things
• America, all broadcasting was mayhem from the very start
• today, very notion of truth itself appears to be withering on the vine, press all too often managing to stir matters into an orgy of general disbelief
• all too often, particularly in recent times, governments have sought to block or otherwise disarrange the kinds of unpleasant formation that might if known do harm to their standing or reputation
• Tiananmen Square massacre image
• in China today it cannot be seen, to display it is a crime
• the incident never happened
• Beijing, laws aplenty that regulate and police cybersecurity
• highly sophisticated filtering and analysis software keeps tabs on everyone
• in China there is currently no Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, Twitter, no meaningful contact with the outside world
• propaganda, original intent of it was wholly religious, evangelical effort, creation of 17th century Vatican
• combat the spreading heresy of Protestantism
• the systematic dissemination of information
• especially in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or a point of view
• Great War, Germans ruefully admitted that they had lost the propaganda war as well as its physical cousin, and vowed never to do so again
• bacon sales slumped, Bernays, effective way in which he managed to change the public mind remains the stuff of PR legend
• newspaper articles duly appeared Doctors Call for Better Breakfast: Bacon and Eggs Give Much Needed Boost
• PR history books in NY
• cigarette was an extension of the penis, a phallic symbol of male power
• a “torch of freedom”
• notion that they were beacons of liberty
• one further small step on the road to equality and justice
• smoking women began to appear in movies and ads, on the streets, everywhere
• manipulation is perpetuated to instill a pervasive fear that what we know might not be true at all, or might have been changed, twisted and manipulated for purposes unimaginable or unethical or unwarranted or simply unkind
• for centuries, the human body was progressively relieved of the need to perform almost any task that its owner preferred to have a machine perform instead, but not the mind
• until, that is, early 19th century, Babbage, understood it was entirely possible to remove one level of labor from the quotidian demands that were made on the average human’s brain
• realization began a trend
• 1967, Texas Instruments, first handheld electronic device that could do just that
• human brain became ever more widely relieved of tedious work doing sums, spelling, map reading — from that moment on
• taking the strain off the brain — spell checking, grammar checker, autocompletion, predictive texting
• US Air Force, network of satellites called Global Positioning System
• GPS
• only truly global utility, freely available to everyone on earth
• courtesy of the taxpaying citizens of the US, who financed everything, from top to bottom, soup to nuts
• accuracy of a receiver anywhere can be located to within a single centimeter, in some cases just a few millimeters
• geography and math, are in the process of being formed into premature retirement
• what is the likely effect on society? eventually no absolute need to know or retain the knowledge of anything?
• Google, at its heart, is a search engine
• Brin, Page
• 1.5B sites right now
• Google was first called Back Rub, no better reason than what they were aiming for was something everyone wanted
• Page Rank — web pages and to Larry Page
• which sites were most important
• it was all about knowledge, about the hypertextual connections
• total neutrality is never attainable in the dispersion of knowledge of any kind, except for math
• digital amnesia, it’s a thing
• no need to learn anything in depth, bullet points will do just fine
• AI has become a watchword, everywhere
• John McCarthy, Turing Test, independent evaluator would be unable to tell whether a certain action was taken by a machine or a human
• a device clever enough to simulate the human would be deemed intelligent, artificially so
• legacy is now everywhere
• fear that one day soon a computer may prove to be fully sentient, have its own feelings, concerns that may not be wholly consonant with our own
• polymath is now a figure of a bygone time, when it was imaginable to know it all
• now there truly is too much to know
• China originated so many concepts and made so many inventions that we in the West have long and wrongly presumed were first made by us
• gunpowder, compass, printing press
• wisdom is the highest state of mental acuity to which a sentient human being can aspire, short only, we are told by Buddhists, enlightenment, awakening, upaya
• sound judgement and right conduct, that is the place of true wisdom
• positive psychology — wise people presumably possess many positive qualities, mature and integrated personality, superior judgement, ability to cope with the vicissitudes of life
• wisdom is uniquely human
• cognitive and emotional development
• driven by experience
• personal quality
• rare in the human population
• can be learned
• can be measured
• increases with age
• as a direct consequence of Hiroshima, today’s world is now awash in atomic weapons
• unilateral nuclear disarmament, vanishingly few now publicly advocate such a move for the US
• politically toxic as it is intellectually laughable
• thinking is unimaginable and unrealistic — but unwise?
• the degree of wisdom deployed in the making of a decision varies directly according to whether that decision involves building something or destroying something
• to create has to be the work of the wise, at least in part
• Confucius spent ten years wandering, trying to induce the men of authority he met to follow the rules he suggested
• Aristotle went abroad to find things out, to explore and learn
• Confucius laid down the rules, Aristotle opened the doors
• perpetually intrigued by the nature of knowledge
• knowledge can be summed up as being justified true belief
• on supposition, analysis, and deep. thought
• Aristotle was as well rounded multi dimensional, clever, knowledgeable, curious and inspired a person as ever lived
• intelligent machines of the future could do the prefrontal lifting, take the strain from the brain
• unburdened by factual overload, then sit back and reap the benefits of being able to once again to think
• what we should know, in order to be fully human