Joe: Most of us think the problem with the internet is 'fake news.' But what if the real crisis is the 'fact' itself? The very idea of a solid, settled fact is a surprisingly recent invention, and the internet may have just broken it for good. Lewis: Wait, hold on. The fact is the problem? Not the lies, not the misinformation, but the actual, boring, solid fact? That sounds completely backward. Joe: It does, but that’s the provocative core of the book we’re diving into today: Too Big to Know by David Weinberger. And Weinberger is the perfect person to make this argument. He's not just a tech guy; he has a Ph.D. in philosophy and was one of the co-authors of the legendary Cluetrain Manifesto back in 2000. He's been thinking about how the internet rewires society for decades. Lewis: A philosopher talking about the internet. Okay, that explains why my brain is already starting to bend. So, what does he mean the 'fact' was invented? Weren't there always facts, like, the sky is blue, water is wet? Joe: That's the exact assumption he dismantles. And to understand the chaos of our current information age, we have to start there, with how knowledge used to be contained, and how it spectacularly broke free.

Joe: For most of human history, knowledge wasn't about collecting little nuggets of data. It was about understanding big, organizing principles. Think of the ancient medical theory of the four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Your health was about the balance of these principles, not about your specific blood pressure reading. Lewis: Right, it was a system, a worldview. You didn't need a thousand data points if you had the one big theory that explained everything. Joe: Precisely. The 'fact' as we know it—a discrete, verifiable, atomic unit of truth—really only came into its own in the 17th and 18th centuries with the rise of science and, interestingly, social reform. People started using statistics, these hard numbers, to argue for things like child labor laws. They’d say, "We're not just arguing from principle; look at these facts about the lives of chimney sweeps." Facts became a weapon for objectivity. Lewis: So a fact used to be like a gold brick. Rare, heavy, and you could hit someone over the head with it in an argument to win. Joe: Perfect analogy. And because they were hard to produce, knowledge was finite. It was stored in physical things: books. And books were stored in buildings: libraries. Weinberger calls this the era of "stopping points." If you wanted to know the population of Pittsburgh in 1983, you went to the library, found the World Almanac, and looked it up. The almanac was the end of the road. You trusted it. You stopped. Lewis: I remember the World Almanac! It was the size of a brick. You definitely didn't question it. You just thought, "Well, the almanac says so." Joe: Exactly. The cost of questioning it—of trying to conduct your own census of Pittsburgh—was impossibly high. So we built our knowledge system on these trusted filters and stopping points. But the internet, Weinberger argues, is the "Great Unnailing." It's a reference to how medieval books were sometimes literally chained to shelves in monasteries. The printing press unchained them. The internet has done something even more profound: it has removed the pages themselves. Lewis: What do you mean it removed the pages? Joe: Think about finding the population of Pittsburgh today. You Google it. You don't get one answer. You get a Wikipedia article with a dozen citations, a link to the Census Bureau's raw data, a city planning blog debating the methodology, and a YouTube video of someone ranting about urban decay. The stopping point is gone. You're left in a bottomless ocean of interconnected information. Lewis: Huh. So the gold brick is gone. Now a fact is more like a single Lego piece. It's almost meaningless on its own. Its value comes from the other pieces you connect it to. Joe: That's it exactly. And once you see knowledge as a network of connections rather than a pile of bricks, it changes everything. It especially changes who we consider an 'expert.'

Lewis: Okay, this is where I get a little nervous. If there are no more stopping points and facts are just these floating Lego pieces, doesn't that mean expertise is dead? Isn't this how we get people thinking they know more than their doctor because they spent an hour on WebMD? Joe: That's the fear, and it's a valid one. But Weinberger presents a more optimistic, if messier, alternative. The book's subtitle is fantastic: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. That last part is the key. Expertise isn't gone; it has just changed its address. It's moved from the individual to the network. Lewis: The smartest person in the room is the room itself. I've heard that phrase. What does it actually look like in practice? Joe: Weinberger gives this incredible example from 2007. The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 left this thick, sludgy oil at the bottom of Prince William Sound. For almost two decades, the oil industry couldn't figure out how to pump it up. The problem was that the oil was so cold that as soon as it was brought to the surface, it would solidify on the barges, making it impossible to handle. Lewis: A classic engineering problem. You'd think the world's best petroleum engineers would be all over that. Joe: They were. And they were stumped. So a non-profit called the Oil Spill Recovery Institute put out a public challenge with a $20,000 prize. The winning solution came from a man named John Davis. He was a chemist from Illinois. His field of expertise? Cement. Lewis: Cement? What does cement have to do with an oil spill? Joe: Nothing, and that was his advantage. He had no preconceived notions about how oil recovery should work. He just knew one thing from his own field: as long as you keep vibrating wet cement, it won't harden. He submitted the idea: what if you just kept the oil mixture constantly stirred up on the barge? It was a simple, elegant solution that had eluded an entire industry of specialists for 18 years, solved by an outsider who saw the problem from a completely different angle. Lewis: Wow. That's amazing. So the network—the open call to everyone—allowed this weird, cross-disciplinary idea to surface. The 'room' in this case was the global network of people who saw the challenge. Joe: Precisely. The network is powerful not just because it's big, but because it's diverse. It contains different perspectives and, as Weinberger puts it, different "heuristics"—different toolkits for solving problems. The oil experts were all using the same toolkit. John Davis walked in with a completely different one. This is also what we saw in the famous DARPA Red Balloon Challenge, where MIT won by creating a network that incentivized thousands of people to find 10 weather balloons across the US in under nine hours. It wasn't one smart person; it was a smart system. Lewis: That's a powerful idea. But I have to push back, because it feels like we're only hearing the highlight reel. For every John Davis, aren't there a thousand people in the network submitting nonsense? How does the 'room' filter out the cranks who think the solution is to use healing crystals or pray the oil away? It feels like this networked expertise could easily become a tyranny of the ignorant. Joe: You've just hit on the central tension of the entire book, and the one that every single one of us lives with every day when we go online.

Lewis: Right, because my experience of the internet isn't always a beautiful collaboration of diverse minds. A lot of the time, it feels like people shouting at each other from inside their own impenetrable bubbles. Joe: And that's the great debate. On one side, you have thinkers like Cass Sunstein who popularized the idea of the "echo chamber" or "filter bubble." The theory is that the internet allows us to perfectly curate our information diet, so we only ever hear from people who already agree with us. Conservatives only read conservative sites, liberals only read liberal sites, and we all become more extreme and more polarized. Lewis: That definitely feels true. It explains a lot about our current political climate. We're not even arguing about the same set of facts anymore. Joe: It feels true, and there's certainly some reality to it. Weinberger calls it "homophily"—our natural tendency to flock together with people like us. But then he points to some fascinating, counter-intuitive research that complicates the picture. A 2010 study by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro looked at people's actual browsing habits. Lewis: And what did they find? Let me guess, it's the opposite of what we all think. Joe: You got it. They found that people who visit partisan political sites—say, a reader of a far-left blog or a listener of a far-right talk show host's website—are actually more likely than the average internet user to visit sites from the opposing political side. Lewis: Hold on, that can't be right. Are you telling me the most hardcore partisans are also the most open-minded? That breaks my brain. Joe: It's not that they're open-minded in the sense of being willing to change their views. They're often going to the other side's sites to see what the "enemy" is saying, to get ammunition for arguments, or just to monitor the opposition. But the key takeaway is that they are being exposed to the other side's arguments. The internet isn't sealing them in a perfect bubble. Instead, Weinberger argues, it's creating what he calls "unsettled discourses." Lewis: Unsettled discourses. What does that mean? Joe: It means the internet is making disagreement more visible, more persistent, and more unavoidable than ever before. In the pre-internet world, it was easier to believe that if we all just sat down and rationally discussed things, we could reach a consensus. The internet has shattered that illusion. It shows us, in real-time, that millions of people hold fundamentally different, deeply felt, and often irreconcilable views. Lewis: So the problem isn't that we're in echo chambers. The problem is that the walls have come down and we're horrified to see just how many people are in the other rooms, and how loudly they're all talking. Joe: Exactly. The internet doesn't create consensus. It creates a more honest, if more chaotic, reflection of human diversity and disagreement. Knowledge is no longer about finding the one, settled truth. It's about navigating a network of permanent, unsettled arguments.

Lewis: Okay, so let's try to tie this all together. If knowledge has been 'unnailed' from its stopping points, and expertise is now a property of the 'room,' and the result is this permanent, chaotic argument... what's the takeaway? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It sounds exhausting. Joe: It is exhausting! And Weinberger acknowledges that. He argues we're in a "crisis of knowledge" precisely because we're trying to apply the old rules to a new game. We're looking for the certainty of the almanac in the chaos of the network. His point is that we need to stop fighting the nature of the network and start embracing it. Lewis: What does that even look like? How do you embrace chaos? Joe: You build better tools to navigate it. You stop trying to filter everything down to one 'true' answer and instead build systems that let you see the connections, the disagreements, and the context. You value transparency over authority. You recognize that the goal isn't for everyone to agree, but for us to have a shared world to disagree in. The book argues that the next great scientific breakthrough, the "next Darwin," won't be a lone naturalist on an island. It'll likely be a data wonk, a team, maybe even an AI, that finds a strange and interesting pattern in a massive, public dataset that no single human could have processed. Lewis: So we're trading the comfort of a simple, settled answer for the power of a complex, connected network. Joe: That is the trade. And it's a trade we've already made, whether we like it or not. The book received a lot of praise for this insight, but it was also polarizing. Some critics felt it was too optimistic, that it downplayed the real dangers of misinformation and the erosion of genuine expertise. But you can't deny its influence. It shifted the conversation. Lewis: It really does. It leaves me with a pretty profound question. In this new world, what does it even mean to be a knowledgeable person? Joe: I think that's the perfect question to end on. Weinberger forces us to ask: Are we willing to trade the comfort of certainty for the power of the network? And what does it mean to be 'knowledgeable' when the smartest person in the room is the room itself? Lewis: A lot to think about. This was a fascinating one. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.