David WeinbergerCríticas

"Knowledge now is the unshaped web of connections within which expressions of ideas live." page 118;
"paper based citations... nails" "hyperlinks...invitations" page 113
"Network decision-making" pages 168-171 "scales better" "excels when decisions require a great deal of local knowledge" "motivate people" "more local knowledge can be applied" makes me wonder if the world of education could be improved with that strategy instead of the top down decisions made by politicians, implemented at the state level and then shoved on down the hierarchy to the LEAs.

Loved this book.

"Win, lose or draw, armed only with imagination we're gonna rip the fucking lid off", quote I can still remember from this book 15 years later.

Quite a big impact on me when I was first starting out in business/it.

No great discoveries here, but a consistently interesting look at the impact of the internet on knowledge.

EXCELLENT book. Great overview of the trends towards tagging and away from our usual way of cataloging things. Recommend it to everyone!

Weinberger è uno dei nomi più noti per quanto riguarda l'evoluzione del nostro approcciarci con la tecnologia. Il fatto che sia filosofo di formazione lo aiuta sicuramente a evitare le trappole del tecnicismo troppo spinto e ad avere uno sguardo più ampio. Devo dire però che in questo libro mi pare manchi qualcosa. Weinberger tesse le magnifiche e progressive sorti del machine learning, anche saltando un po' di palo in frasca, e di come il modello di Laplace, o se volete di Newton, di causalità sia oramai stato buttato via per arrivare a un nuovo modello che dal nostro punto di vista è fondamentalmente casuale e si basa più sulla generatività, cioè la capacità di un sistema di far generare qualcosa che non era stato pensato a priori. Che questo succeda è indubbio; i dubbi sono sull'accettare acriticamente che se un test A-B dà un risultato questo sia la verità e non una fluttuazione statistica. (Sì, ho presente il concetto di correlazione e anche quello di campione statistico). Inutile poi aggiungere che il "progresso casuale", come e più del progresso causale, è toccato dal pregiudizio del sopravvissuto; mostrare solo gli esempi vincenti non dà il quadro completo. Infine non riesco a capire perché essere in una rete iperconnessa comporti che il progresso non sia lineare. I balzi possono esserci in ogni modello, e la connessione al più dovrebbe permettere maggiori migliorie marginali perché c'è più gente che ci lavora. Detto tutto questo, penso che sia comunque un ottimo testo per vedere come sta cambiando non tanto il mondo quanto la nostra percezione del mondo. La traduzione di Massimo Durante è infine scorrevole, ma in qualche punto qua e là mi ha lasciato una sensazione strana.

I wasn't terribly impressed by this book, although it may have been due to the fact that I've read a number of books about information and knowledge over the past few years, many of which he cites.

Though this book made the rounds of the librarian blogs, I was not particularly impressed. Basically, the author says "digital good, print bad. Organization bad; chaos good." A few rips on librarians for the work they do. While it had some interesting historical notes, I honestly did not see the big deal. So, the Internet is less organized, and people are setting up their own forms of organization to suit their needs. Ok, then what? Even though everything is miscellaneous, as the author claims, there is always a method somehow, no matter how much he protests. A lot of this I already knew, which is probably why I did not care much for the book.

The central thesis of Everything Is Miscellaneous is one with which I completely agree: digital information environments allow us to organize, access, and interact with information in new and previously undreamt ways. It allows us to transcend the limitations of physical storage and communication media, to free information to be everywhere and anywhere all at the same time.

It allows information to be whatever we need, whenever we need it. There exists more potential now to add more value, not just to information itself, but to the ways we access and interact with it. Mr. Weinberger offers us a powerful and compelling vision for our digital information world.

These three quotes perfectly sum up what this book is about:

From p. 212: “The difference in the digital order is the difference between the annoying interactions you have on a product support line... and the conversations you have with real people. ... The potential for connections from the trivial to the urgent is characteristic of the new miscellany. We are busily creating as many of these meaningful connections as we can.”

From p. 40: “How we organize our world reflects not only the world but also our interests, our passions, our needs, our dreams.”

From p. 45: “Now we know that not everything has its place. Everything has its places.”

As I was reading this book, I kept stopping to write down reactions that I had to various passages and arguments that he makes. I have seven type-written pages of reactions to this work - some enthusiastic agreement, and some incredulous “what is he thinking?!?” criticisms. It’s rare that a book can generate such passionate involvement from me. I value those that do. As exciting as I find many of Mr. Weinberger’s ideas, and as infuriating as I find some of his reasoning, I appreciate how this work challenges my thinking and requires me to question my assumptions.

This book is important. If there’s only one thing you take from this review, let it be that.

That being said – some of the examples Mr. Weinberger uses to back up his arguments are so off-base that I find myself questioning whether he really knows what he’s talking about. Too often, in order to try and make his point he oversimplifies things too much. But any vision for how we should interact with information must answer to nuanced reality. This book seriously lacks nuance.

One example: He consistently discusses the difference between the organization of information and the organization of access as though these must intrinsically be in conflict. Nothing in my experience working in a public library suggests that this is the case. But he needs it to be black & white in order to argue his point, so he overstates the reality of it.

In my opinion, the biggest failing of this work is that Mr. Weinberger seriously misappraises the state of information literacy in our society. More accurately – he doesn’t appraise it at all. Like most well-educated, well-read, literate people, he assumes that information seekers will exercise discernment and analytical thinking when they interact with information.

Working in a public library, I can categorically state that he’s wrong about this. The information literacy of the average information seeker has not kept pace with the expansion of our information environments.

This, then, speaks to the one aspect of his argument that I absolutely cannot agree with – his vilification of expertise.

He presents experts as dictators – people who jealously control access and capriciously decree what information people are allowed to have. If this is truly how he sees experts, then he’s correct to crusade against them.

But that’s not what experts are - it's certainly not what they should be. Not at all. Far from being dictators and judges, experts are teachers and guides.

Consider the role of expertise in light of the two basic acts of information interaction:

1) Searching for information: Mr. Weinberger takes it as given that people know how to search for information effectively. But many people don’t. When people don’t know how to search effectively, our rich and expansive world of digital information becomes overwhelming – a roiling, chaotic mess. Experts teach people how to find what they need within this tsunami of data.

On p. 132, he states: “[W]ith the miscellaneous, it’s all available to us, unfiltered.” And that’s a wonderful thing... but it also means that specific bits of information are harder to find. It becomes the old saw – looking for needle in a haystack. Experts can act as the information seeker’s metal detector.

2) Evaluating information: Once an information search returns results, he assumes that the information seeker will know what to do with them. It’s continually a shock to me how little skill many people demonstrate in the task of evaluating information – how credulous and uncritical people are. Many people don’t know how to recognize good, substantiated information from hearsay, rumor, conjecture; reliable information from the many shades of salesmanship.

Mr. Weinberger assumes that people will be actively engaged in their participation with information. But all too often, I see people looking for quick and easy answers, wanting most of all not to have to think too much about it. It’s continually shocking to me how many people overlook the best results in favor of the convenience of the first results.

Not only do many people lack the necessary skills to discern quality information from dreck, many people don’t understand why that should matter. In Chapter 6, he talks about the ready availability of medical information online. He’s correct that we should be active participants in our care, pro-active information seekers, and recognize that the medical industry isn’t as unbiased in its recommendations as it should be.

But I also shudder at the thought of someone listening to a crackpot on a blog instead of a qualified medical expert. Consider the potential for tremendous harm when someone doesn’t know to be critical of the information they find.

Experts teach people how to be discerning information seekers.

Experts: not dictators, but guides; not judges, but cheerleaders; not pedants, but teachers. We need experts teach people necessary information literacy skills. Given the current state of information literacy in our society, we need experts now more than ever.

Any attempt to address the realities of our digital information age must include a frank discussion of information literacy – and Mr. Weinberger never once mentions it in this book. To me, this is a serious failing.

And this is what kind of drives me crazy about Everything Is Miscellaneous – on the one hand, I agree completely that digital information environments are wonderful and exciting in their potential. I love that I get to spend my career exploring them.

But on the other hand, there are too many examples and arguments in this book that I disagree with for me to ever get completely onboard with it. Digital information environments offer mind-boggling potential for us to reassess and revamp our informational world – but we must ask essential critical questions about whether some of these proposed changes are actually good for us. Whether or not I ultimately agree with Mr. Weinberger’s vision, I don’t see him asking some of these essential questions. He takes it too much for granted that this is all to the good.

What I'd like to see next is an examination of how Mr. Weinberger’s ideas integrate with our current knowledge of neuroscience. No matter how digital our information becomes, no matter how far our access and interaction environments are removed from the constraints of the physical world, there’s one aspect of the information environment that remains resolutely, irrefutably physical – the wiring of our brains. Brains filled with neurons and axons and signal pathways which evolved over millennia to handle the physical world.

We need a better understanding of how our physical brains apprehend and process information when it’s organized according to schema that have no referents to the physical world. This is a gap in our understanding that must be filled.

Excellent introduction to classification systems, with a lot of anecdotes and examples. Weinbergers main point is that while classification systems for physical objects can have only one order, computer organized classification systems can have endless different orders and subsets. So there is no need to impose the limitations of physical classification systems onto the digital domain.

Weinberger's presetation of the book at GoogleTalks in 2007 will give you an excellent condesed explanation of the book (in 1 hour), but the book is so vivid that I recommend both the talk and the book.

Must read for all (wannabe) librarians and people who organize information on the web.

Everyday Chaos is an instantly excellent book. Right in the introduction, David Weinberger provokes you with: “The true complexity of the world far outstrips the laws and models we devise to explain it.” Enlarging on this, he digs the hole deeper: “At least since the ancient Hebrews, we have thought ourselves to be the creatures uniquely made by God with the capacity to receive his Revelation of the truth. Since the ancient Greeks, we’ve defined ourselves as the rational animals who are able to see the logic and order beneath the apparent chaos of the world.” We put ourselves on a pedestal, and worshipped.

Basically, we not only don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t understand what we think we know. The inescapable conclusion is - you must read on.

Every so often, our neatly ordered world is buffeted by some scientist/philosopher who says it’s not what you think. And it’s not why you think and not how you think it. It operates differently, for different reasons, different causes, with different relationships and outcomes. Newton, Einstein and Galileo performed these roles, changing the course of thought and action forever. Now, it seems Weinberger looks to artificial intelligence (AI) to take on that role.

His first and best example is a healthcare learning monster called Deep Patient. The Deep Patient project fed a computer with hundreds of data points for every one of 700,000 patients and let it figure out what it could, without restrictions. This is called deep learning, and results in findings humans never considered or could even imagine. It made diagnoses and predictions that were way outside the box for the medical fraternity, and were reliable. The lesson from Deep Patient is that deep learning systems do not have to simplify the world to what humans can understand, he says.

The book is very tight. Weinberger has it highly organized, as the ancient Greeks would have appreciated. He is easy to follow, entertaining along the way and provides an intriguingly different perspective on the way of the world. Can’t ask for much more.

Backing off to basics, Weinberger shows what Man does is anticipate. He loves to understand all the possibilities in advance, and prepare for them. Machines don’t have those blinders on. They operate in unanticipation, where anything is possible given the data that shows it. They let the data instruct them. No hypotheses are necessary. It goes against everything we’ve built to date.

This is the kind of analysis and exploration that pervades the book. It is a pleasure of discovery. It is a revelation to watch as he puts the puzzle pieces together. That he does it with humor is a delightful bonus.

In a discussion of programming AI, he hits on the ugly problem of decisions in an emergency. What is fair? What is appropriate? What will minimize the negative outcome? Who get to decide? The machine will do what we program it to do. He says: “Machine learning systems are profoundly nonmoral. They are just machines, not Just machines.”

We show our insecurity and ignorance by insisting that machines explain themselves to us. We insist on knowing how they came to their result. We want accountability for self-learning we cannot understand. We hold the machines to higher standards than we do for humans. Years ago, Google said it could not alter the objectionable results its search engine produced, because they didn’t understand how it got them. Algorithms are black boxes, and just because we couldn’t have come to the same answers, doesn’t mean we need to be able to parse every move to get to them. It wouldn’t help us.

Animal scientist Frans de Waal criticizes his peers for conducting biased tests on animals, somehow always proving than Man is a superior animal. David Weinberger is doing much the same thing between AI and Man. Until and unless we stop trying to instill the values of Man into machines, the machines will never achieve their potential. They will usher in dystopia instead of providing the answers we would never have considered on our own.

Weinberger says we have come to the point where we see “the world as further beyond our understanding than we’ve let ourselves believe.” It’s an update to Herbert Stein’s famous “The more I seem to know, the less I seem to know.” Everyday Chaos is the right book for this moment.

David Wineberg

I read the first half and liked it pretty well. The second half seemed more of the same. I found the argument about how we organize information hierarchically when we no longer need to interesting. However, as many others commented, he is very out of touch with libraries and how we approach searches these days.

One of the best books I have read about the Web.

Allora è vero. L’ha detto finalmente anche Lui, il Papa: troppa comunicazione fa male! Me lo aspettavo. Ho citato lui, Benedetto XVI che se ne intende. Ma desidero anche citare una mia vecchia, cara zia, che è ancora da queste parti, vicino ai cento anni. Soleva dire, quando c’era ancora, intendo quando era ancora in sé: “Anche il veleno, purché sia poco, non fa male”. Insomma il classico “q.b.” dei medici: “quanto basta”. Il problema sta proprio là: “quando” dire basta e ... “quanto” basta?

Nel mondo della comunicazione contemporanea “i piccoli pezzi” non finiscono mai di essere messi insieme. Mi riferisco ai "small pieces loosely joined" della teoria del web di David Weinberger messa su qualche anno fa. Il libro è stato tradotto in italiano col titolo di "Arcipelago Web". Quei "pezzettini" sono sempre più sparsi intorno, sono impazziti addirittura. Si stringono sempre di più alla gola di chi vive questo nostro tempo virtuale. Il rumore diventa sempre più assordante, il senso si scioglie e si diluisce, le immagini aumentano a dismisura e diventano illusioni. Tutto accade contemporaneamente, nulla resta. Insomma è il vecchio “tutto scorre”. Un giorno o l’altro anche io scorrerò definitivamente, come lui, e lui come gli altri. Ma nessuno sembra rendersene conto. E allora che facciamo? Ci fermiamo? Spegniamo le TV e i computer? Chiudiamo i giornali o la bocca dei giornalisti? E poi chiudiamo noi, bloggers, forumisti, chatters, gossippari, ipoddari, facebookisti, twitteriani. E dove ce ne andremo? Cosa faremo? Nel frattempo riascoltiamoci un pò di rumore con Raffaella Carrà ...

Fascinating. I've been using tagging more and more - here on LibraryThing, in Evernote, etc - but I hadn't really thought about the underlying meanings. Weinberger did, and lays them out nicely - first-order arranging actual things (books on a shelf), second-order arranging references (card catalog), third-order tags which are not arranged, just randomly scattered about - but can be organized immediately into whatever order the individual wants at the moment (all the books by X about Y, all the books tagged SF (for the various possible meanings of SF)...). One interesting facet is that he was writing in 2007, and forecast some things ten years ahead...to now. He got most of them wrong, of course (There won't be much editing left to do on Wikipedia, just polishing...), but it's a fascinating look at how he saw things.½

La stanza intelligente è un libro di grande intensità e ricco di riferimenti bibliografici per analizzare l’evoluzione dei percorsi di conoscenza collettiva a seguito dell’affermazione del web. Non è mai scontato Weinberger, nonostante l’iperproduzione di testi su questo argomento rappresenti un rischio; anzi. Il filosofo americano conduce per mano il lettore con una intelligente analisi dei percorsi evolutivi dell’informazione, dalla carta al link: si modificano i sistemi di referaggio dei contenuti, di consultazione, di interazione tra autori e lettori; ma alcuni principi rimangono validi, la valenza delle referenze accademiche o della qualità delle pubblicazioni, a prescindere dalle modalità di diffusione dei contenuti, solo per fare un esempio. Insomma, la teoria di Weinberger è che la conoscenza si evolve, la cartolarizzazione delle idee consentita dal web consente di aprire un dialogo multicanale tra soggetti che difficilmente avrebbero potuto entrare precedentemente in contatto. E’ un libro fondamentale perché va oltre una serie di banalizzazioni sul ruolo di Internet per la diffusione della conoscenza e lo fa con grande rigore, nonostante una certa difficoltà di lettura, dovuta, oggettivamente, alla complessità dell’argomento.½

The author is an interesting man: he's a marketing consultant with a Ph.D. in philosophy who works at the Harvard Law School and advised Howard Dean's brief run for president. His book *The Cluetrain Manifesto* was memorably influential in 2001. He writes engagingly, informally, and clearly. Unfortunately, this book consists of ten chapters all saying the same thing: that we have moved past the age of classifying information in hierarchies and one-to-one relationships, and moved into the world of tagging and metadata. That's it. Each chapter simply explores this simple message from a slightly different angle.

Frankly, and with no arrogance meant, I knew this already, and find most of its implications obvious. (News flashes: the Dewey Decimal System is out of date [chapter 3]. Wikis, especially Wikipedia, are effective repositories of knowledge [chapter 7]. Classifying things too restrictively is counterproductive [chapter 9].) So I did not find the book a "mind-opener" (BuzzMachine.com), it did not make a "profound contribution" to my understanding of "the impact of the digital revolution" (BBC Global News), and despite what Esther Dyson says, I will indeed look at a humble bookshelf or store shelf the same way again.

Some of this is not the author's fault as much as it is the passage of time: it's 2015, and the book was written in 2007. Still, enough had happened by 2007 to make Scott Rosenberg of Salon.com's comment that the book shows "the benefits of moving from paper to bits" seem strangely out of time.

For those who haven't yet got the message, this could be a useful book. For example, I want to send this passage to the leaders of the heavily siloed organization that signs my paychecks: "Thinking that people's skills are defined by the department they're in wastes their talent. (It also means that companies frequently start corporate blogs with the least interesting people—the marketers—as their initial bloggers.) [A business] should scribble over the lines of division with lines of connection. Every line that's drawn ought to be systematically smudged....Everything belongs in more than one place, at least a little bit."

Not a flawless book, but definitely an important book. I've been using it for 3 semesters to teach a class on information architecture and research methods and I've yet to find a more recent alternative that addresses what it means to organize and find information in today's context more clearly and practically.

I finished this on the plane heading into LA. I really, really enjoyed reading the book, but it is going to take me quite a bit of time to unpack it. I was surprised that its reviews were so mixed. It did not suffer from the flaws attributed to it, I thought. Instead, I think the reviewers were expecting it to put forward a particular kind of argument that Weinberger declined (wisely, IMHO) to engage in.

Epistemologically speaking, Weinberger just assumes that the critiques raised by continental thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault have been shown to be justified. His critics seem to want him to rehash and re-argue these critiques. Instead of doing this, Weinberger points to new ways data is being stored and new ways that people are creating knowledge out of these data as examples of how these critiques do a better job of explaining knowledge in today's contexts than do uncritical correspondence theories of truth or the idea that science is a mirror of nature. (I can see how readers who do not share an enthusiasm for continental philosophy and Pragmatism might find this assumption abrupt, but I would have found yet another rehash of that argument tedious and unnecessary.)

I've too much to say to put into this Goodreads review, but I hope to have a more thorough one up at informationgames.info in the near future.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web was as philosophical as it sounds. The view of the web presented here is very abstract, focusing on the way the web has (according to the author) caused people to re-define fundamental concepts such as space, time and togetherness. I found a lot of the evidence he offered in support of these views self-evident although I'm still not sure I agree with his assertion that we view time differently because of the internet. I do, however, agree with his final point which is that the internet in many ways allows people to interact in a more intuitive way than we can in the real world. I think the book would have been better had he focused more on this point throughout.

Read more here...

Le cluetrain-manifesto , signé par des centaines de managers depuis un an, bouscule nos ressentis sur les nouveaux modes de consommation. Le Manifeste nous exhorte dans un style plutôt agressif à repenser les marchés, et la place des entreprises comme de leurs employés sur ces nouveaux espaces.

An easy read about the new nature of knowing in the hyperlinked age, but none of the conclusions are very profound. I did like some of the examples and especially the advocacy of open access publishing and publishing unfiltered "rough drafts" in science.

If I hadn't just finished a Masters degree in Library and Information Science I may have been more engrossed with Everything is Miscellaneous- David Weinberger's look at the contemporary issues of knowledge classification in our digital environments. He does, however, write entertainingly on the subject and provides an array of appropriate examples to bolster his arguments. A light and readable introduction to these issues.

Read the title and you're done.

As far as I got, anyway, the author has one thing he wants to tell you in this book: faceted classification is awesome, and now that more things are digitized, we can actually use it.

(Faceted classification is where something is categorized in more than one place, e.g. how you can put a book on more than one Goodreads shelf, as opposed to in real life where it can only be in one physical location)

I kept skipping chapters to see if he had anything else to say, but if he did I missed it. He does have a lot of interesting metaphors that he uses to explain things, at least. Like if your kitchen was the Dewey Decimal System, chocolate sprinkles would be a spice. Or something.

I don't mean to be rude about it, but I kept checking to see what year this was written. He keeps talking about card catalogs! And I'm not sure if he thinks these ideas are going to be news to librarians, but hm, not since about 1930 (see S.R. Ranganathan).

I think I would have found this fascinating if I hadn't already gone and went to library school.