Infotopia - In common knowledge we trust ...

In 2006 Oxford University Press published small but influential book by Cass R. Sunstain - "Infotopia". Sunstain is a legal scholar, specialized in constitutional, administrative and environmental laws and in behavioral economics.

The subtitle to Infotopia raises the question: "How many minds produce knowledge?".
Sunstain analyses the undergoing transformation of human knowledge accelerated by the Internet. He focuses on specific methods of obtaining the information dispersed in modern society. When the information is properly aggregated and analyzed it can be transformed into knowledge. He describes the role of deliberating groups, surveys, prediction markets, and specific new Internet-era inventions: wikis, blogs and open source software (it seems he omitts Social Networks).

The true value of the book lies not in exaltation upon these new methods, but in true and deep analysis of their internal problems and risks. For example, when he analyses famous Condorcet's Jury Theorem, he shows when the theorem may fail or not to be applicable.
Then, he specifically analyses the effects of social pressures in groups, amplification of cognitive errors, cascade effects, hidden profiles, group polarization and many others.

There is an intriguing chapter about prediction markets - the "tools" that work much better in almost all predictions than any survey or pool. Prediction markets realize in practice Friedrich Hayek conclusion about the price as one of the best aggregative mechanism.
As before, he also warns that they sometimes fail as well...

Despite all these warnings - the book is very optimistic in its final conclusion.

Let me know for somehow more personal conclusion. I read Infotopia just after "The Glass Bead Game". And I'm delighted - delighted about the state of the culture and society and the comunal knowledge, with all these shadows. And I'm happy the world is not and never will be as it was envisioned by Hesse in "The Glass Bead Game", where few cultivate the top knowledge, where elites are not only governing the masses but where the knowledge is under strict control of a few...

When everything is Miscellaneous - what is left ?

This is the third great book of David Weinberger that I was happy to read. Of course, the first, Cluetrain Manifesto (he co-authored it) and the second, Small Pieces Loosly Joined are great books that show the transforming power of Internet and its role in business and in social life.
"Everything is miscellaneous" is a bit different. The book, with some small exceptions, focuses on knowledge and the fundamental transformation that the very concept of konwledge and science undergoes today. The book demonstrates the weakness of the old-style "categorized" and well-ordered knowledge originating in Aristotelian science (to who - of course - the credit of the knowledge creation must be given !!!). It was known since the dawn of civilisation that since and knowledge evolve through discourse of scholars and thinkers. Today everybody can be a scholar and thinker and publisher and mentor. The amazing fact is that, contrary to common sense - this not only degrades the level of discourse, but in fact increases it. See Wikipedia case (which author analyses deeply).

From my perspective, the most interesting parts are those about classification systems, with the stress of "faceted classification" (e.g. colon classification system), that allows to build unlimited trees of knowledge and the notes about semantic web. Without pretending to know the reasons, Weinberger sheds some light on the failure or maybe rather, slow progress of Semantic Web. Surprisingly, the potential reasons are in the very nature of Semantic Web formulation, in RDF like mode, which does not fall far from Aristotelian, non-miscellaneous way of thinking.
For me it is like David Weinberger was to tell us - it is the meaning that matters, not the rigid structure of knowledge.

He tries to find the tools to represent meaning in the concept of "the third order of order": " ... but only if we see past its mess to its meaning, for that is what the third order enables" and “The world won’t ever stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours”

However, in line with the message of the book - it is not easy to explain clearly and without some ambiguity, what are the tools to contain the meaning. Are they in folksonomies? are they in interaction and the way Wikipedia works ? We may fall short if we try to DEFINE them. Or maybe we need to wait until the next book of this great author ...

There are also very interesting thoughts about business today. See the quote: "In a truly miscellaneous world, a successful business owns nothing but what it wants to sell us. The rest is ours."

Great Writers on Great Books

It's a bit unusual to write a review about ... the radio programs. But in this case, Wisconsin Public Radio published (in its famous series "The Best of our knowledge" (http://ttbook.org/) made by
Jim Fleming and Steve Paulson), an amazing series "Authors, Authors - Great Writers on Great Books". Its ( a bit unimpresive) website is: http://www.wpr.org/book/greatbooks/

The list of really authors interviewed mostly by Steve are:

Alice Walker, VS Naipaul , Orhan Pamuk, Alexie Sherman, Salman Rushdie ,
Khaled Hosseini and others. There is also a great listening about some who passed away like Valdimir Nabokov or Charles Bukowski.

I strongly recommend this audio programmes. You can find real audio at http://wpr.org/book/greatbooks/index.html.

What was however the most important to me, it was Salman's Rushdie expresion about books, see the next psot on this blog...
Here I recall that Rushdie called his famous "Satanic verses" as his least political books of all (and I must say its true).