The Internet of Us

by Michael P. Lynch

  8. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, xii.

  9. David Leonhardt, “When the Crowd Isn’t Wise,” New York Times, July 7, 2012.

  10. Nate Silver, “The Virtues and Vices of Election Prediction Markets,” New York Times, October 24, 2012.

  11. I was helped to see these points in discussions with Sandy Goldberg and Nate Sheff. The example in the text is similar to that in Goldberg, “The Division of Epistemic Labor,” 117.

  12. Weinberger, Too Big to Know, 21.

  13. Descartes, Meditations, 103.

  14. Weinberger, Too Big to Know, 23.

  15. Sosa, Reflective Knowledge, chs. 7 and 8..

  16. Pritchard, Epistemic Luck, 225.

  Chapter 7: Who Gets to Know

  1. Lawrence M. Sanger, “Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge,” Edge 208 (April 25, 2007): http://edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html%3E. Accessed August 25, 2015.

  2. Brabham, Crowdsourcing, xix.

  3. Jeppesen and Lakhani, “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness.”

  4. Brabham, Crowdsourcing, 21.

  5. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 18.

  6. Ibid., 19. See also 179–80.

  7. Fricker rightly distinguishes epistemic inequality from what she calls epistemic injustice: Epistemic Injustice, 1–2. But the two are related, as noted below.

  8. Frank LaRue, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly, May 16, 2011. Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf. Accessed August 28, 2015.

  9. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 204.

  10. To be precise, what she calls “testimonial” epistemic injustice. See Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, ch. 2.

  11. People v. Hall.

  12. Gordon, “Shifting the Geography of Reason” and Disciplinary Decadence.

  13. “Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be,” Economist, December 1, 2012.

  14. Michael Mitchell, Vincent Palacios, and Michael Leachman, “States are Still Funding Higher Education at Pre-Recession Levels.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 1, 2014. Available at: http://www.cbpp.org/research/states-are-still-funding-higher-education-below-pre-recession-levels?fa=view&id=4135. Accessed August 28, 2015.

  14. Carole Cadwalladr, “Do Online Courses Spell the End for the Traditional University?,” Guardian, November 10, 2012.

  15. Schuster and Finkelstein, The American Faculty, 40. See also Introduction.

  16. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 109.

  Chapter 8: Understanding and the Digital Human

  1. Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientifc Method Obsolete,” Wired 16, no. 7: June 23, 2008.

  2. Rudder, Dataclysm, 10–11.

  3. Ginsberg et al., “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data.”

  4. Mayer-Schöneberger and Cukier, Big Data, 55–56. The examples just above also come from this interesting and informative book.

  5. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 59.

  6. Bruner and Postman, “On the Perception of Incongruity.”

  7. Rudder, Dataclysm, 196.

  8. Schich et al., “A Network Framework of Cultural History.”

  9. In conversation.

  10. This example illustrates an everyday experience for all of us. But it also illustrates what Pritchard calls “veritic luck” (Pritchard, Epistemic Luck , 146–47) or what we might also call “environmental luck.” Environmental luck sometimes seems to undermine knowledge. But it isn’t clear that it does here. Do we really want to say that Google searches don’t give us knowledge? I don’t think so.

  11. One might protest that if safety is a requirement for true receptive belief, then since believing X in the scenario is unsafe, then said belief is not receptive. But as I note above about knowledge, this seems anti-intuitive to the extreme. If Web searches—which are paradigm examples of environmental luck—fail to give us receptive beliefs, then we searchers know very much less than we thought we did.

  12. Grimm, “Understanding” and “Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?”

  13. This is a broadly Aristotelian account of understanding. See Greco, “Episteme,” and Grimm, “Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?” Not everyone sees understanding as involving knowledge; see Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding.”

  14. Thus, understanding need not be factive, although the deeper it becomes, the more it will approach factivity. To understand perfectly, as it were, is factive. For further discussion, see Elgin, “Is Understanding Factive?” and Zagzebski, “Recovering Under-standing.”

  15. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 26.

  16. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, “A Five-Stage Model” and Mind over Machine, especially 30ff.

  17. Milner, “Les Troubles de la mémoire.”

  18. Stanley and Krakauer, “Motor Skill Depends on Knowledge of Facts.”

  19. For further development of this view, see Stanley, Know How.

  20. For discussions of this interpretation, see Zagzebski, On Epistemology, 141–44.

  21. See Plato, Complete Works: “Gorgias,” X62–63.

  22. Dreyfus stresses the importance of experience and motivation for mastery of a skill in On the Internet, 42–43.

  23. Julie Scelfo, “Kindergarten Shop Class,” New York Times, March 30, 2011.

  24. Boden, The Creative Mind, 2–3.

  25. Ibid., 2.

  Chapter 9: The Internet of Us

  1. Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, 179.

  2. Zagzebski, On Epistemology, 145. See also “Recovering Under-standing.”

  3. Kitcher, Abusing Science. 47–49. I don’t mean to suggest that Kitcher would embrace my views on understanding, however.

  4. Lazer et al., “The Parable of Google Flu.”

  5. Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 192.

  6. Pete Pachal, “Google Glass Will Have Automatic Picture-Taking Mode,” Mashable, July 25, 2012. Available at http://mashable.com/2012/07/25/google-glass-photo-mode/#SI4XL.9XkOqI. Accessed September 4, 2015

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