Summary: The use of Google searches appears likely to enable speedy construction of high quality knowledge-bases, quite possibly faster than use of traditional libraries .(Draft 2)

 

I've just read a fine Disenchanted article on, among other things, quality control in knowledge-making. My interest and learning were both heightened by the author's use of great Library of Alexandria. A description of the document finding and copying actions of ship-searching scholars from that library served as an introduction to the issues which I associate with 'knowledge' and 'the truth'. Disenchanted's author noted that those interested in 'true' knowledge [but not, at the onset, sufficiently skilled or empowered to directly check any particular claim's credentials] can read and compare the authorities' arguments and choose that claim that is [somehow] found to most closely meet standards of truth. In a library, the author notes, a knowledge builder has access to alternate claims for true knowledge with regard to any given area of experience. Ultimately, the skilled knowledge builder will extract the truth. The author's formula: "the truth is whatever the bulk of logically consistent evidence says it is."

 Whether meeting the standards of truth amounts to finding the bulk of logically consistent evidence and argument, to a vote count, to a measure of the persuasiveness and/or the reputation of an author or to some other, perhaps even more telling, standard it is clear that any would be better than adding to one's knowledge base based on 'hearsay' alone. Central to individual quality control in knowledge making is an engagement of the 'critical mind'. (Accepting a knowledge claim with examination demonstrates an absence of its use).

 The author has eloquently and entertainingly asserted that knowledge claims must pass tests before validated as 'true' knowledge. He has also points out that access to a library (and the skill to use it) gives the post-Gutenburg citizen the means to compare knowledge claims. It is clear that he believes that Google makes it more likely (because of speed, accessibility and user-friendliness) that the skilled knowledge maker will be able to a) find knowledge claims and b) to ascertain the quality of those claims' credentials.

 

But now we come to the issue of whether the recipients of knowledge claims found by Google will be more or less likely to adopt 'bunk' as credentialed knowledge. Enchanted's argument appears to be that if one inserts a knowledge claimant [such as the false claim that 'an airplane wing causes lift' ] into a Google search one will get articles that not only vote for it but against it.

 

In short, if a) the claim is false, and b) the claim is inserted into a Google search, then Google will tend to find a mixture of opinions on the worth of that claim. Presumably, the more patently false that the world of knowledge makers has found the claim to be the more obvious will be the summed disagreement [of Google's finds] to its claims of legitimacy. One hopes the same will be true for what is 'clearly true' to knowledge makers -- that is, an actually credentialed 'piece' of knowledge-one with a true claim - shows itself to be so when submitted to the same search mechanism.

 

I am left with a question or two about Google and about libraries as tools in any knowledge making process. My questions have to do with the direct versus indirect construction of knowledge. I think it important to recognize that everyone is a knowledge maker; we may have varying skill and motivation that we bring to the process, perhaps, but we are all knowledge makers nonetheless.

 

If we are all knowledge makers and we are concerned with people accepting, second hand, 'bunk' as knowledge, perhaps we could help all remember the everyday mechanisms for recognizing good knowledge claims and help them apply those same rules to knowledge claims made by others. Those statements, the ones we can learn to apply to the direct experience as we attempt to sift the wheat of good knowledge from the chaff of partial or wrong-headed knowledge claims, would serve as the foundation for the whole knowledge making enterprise as it extends to the indirect, to the search for knowledge via books and web documents.

 

As a means of restating my interest: Perhaps we would do well to examine how the chaff and wheat were separated before writing and reading were omnipresent. All of us have a vested, survival related, interest in 'the truth', i.e., knowledge that allows us to reach our goals, to survive and prosper for another day or decade. Perhaps history and anthropology and even everyday experience can help us tell us better understand knowledge-making.