KNOWLEDGE 2.0

A strategy for navigating the deluge of information in these data-saturated times.

Chisnell begins his “user’s guide to living in a world of Knowledge 2.0” with all the familiar observations about the new, nearly inscrutable world we inhabit, one “where knowledge floats on a sea of uncertainty and doubt.” The remainder of the book is just as familiar, a rehearsal of the tropes and commonplaces that fill this saturated genre, including the challenges of bias and misinformation and our need to think independently. His aim is to provide some guidance for understanding a society that has undergone such a mammoth “transformation in the scale of knowledge production,” there is little firm ground for the rational generation of sound opinion. To accomplish this, the author formulates a kind of popular epistemology that divides the various kinds of knowledge into six categories and then anatomizes the vices and virtues of each of them as sources of belief. For example, he considers the dramatic power of storytelling, the value of scientific theory, the precariousness of prediction, and the prevalence of random chance. In the case of storytelling, for example, he convincingly argues that a powerful narrative is often more compelling than a purely rational demonstration. His prose is unfailingly clear, and he illustrates his points with references to sailing, concluding each discussion with brief synopsis called “staying afloat.” The best of his treatment is the appraisal of scientific authority—he rightfully acknowledges that while science is widely considered a “powerful arbiter of truth and falsehood,” it’s susceptible to constant revision, which at the very least complicates its claim to represent the apex of rationality. The remainder of the work, however, issues little more than cliches and banalities (“The problem in front of us isn’t always the one we need to fix”). These commonplaces are often conveyed in stilted prose: “One of the easiest ways to be fooled by a story is to rely on it when there could be other, more useful information available in logic or maths.” Chisnell is surely right that our unprecedented age calls for new epistemologies, but this work doesn’t deliver them.

A reiteration of conventional truisms about information overload.