Too Big to Know

To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.

A species that gets answers and can then stop asking is able to free itself for new inquiries.

The best problem solvers tend to be similar; therefore, a collection of the best problem solvers performs little better than any one of them individually. A collection of random, but intelligent, problem solvers tends to be diverse. This diversity allows them to be collectively better.5

Even if the smartest person in the room is the room itself, the room does not magically make all who enter it smart.

But now that our medium can handle far more ideas and information, and now that it is a connective medium (ideas to ideas, people to ideas, people to people), our strategy is changing. And that is changing the very shape of knowledge.

Because of the economics of paper, facts were relatively rare and gem-like because there wasn’t room for a whole lot of them. Because of the physics of paper, once a fact was printed, it stayed there on the page, uncontradicted, at least on that page.

Facts are facts. It’s a fact that polio vaccine is effective and it’s a fact that Cancer the constellation has nothing to do with tumors. But the idea that the house of knowledge is built on a foundation of facts is not itself a fact. It’s an idea with a history that is now taking a sharp turn.

“True enough, we have internal experts we can draw on,” says Cenkl, “but we’ve also realized that we need to change the way we present ourselves. It’s not necessarily that the MITRE person is the smartest person in the room. We’ve decided that the model needs to evolve so that we become the brokers of expertise. Our value is that we understand the

On the Net, every fact has an equal and opposite reaction.