David Weinberger > Quotes

“the next darwin is more likely to be a data wonk than a naturalist wandering through an exotic landscape”
― David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

“The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge.”
― David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room

“Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms—that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.”
― David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room

“Transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge.”
― David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room

“Science had been a type of publishing and now it is becoming a network.”
― David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room

“Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti.”
― David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

“how we predict shows us how we think the future happens and thus how the world works.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Yet about an AlphaGo move that left some commenters literally speechless, one go master, Fan Hui, said, “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move.” Then, softly, “So beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“The mall owes its existence to Level II complexity: malls weren’t feasible before there were cars, yet you could not predict their rise just by examining a car.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“AI in the form of machine learning, and especially deep learning, is letting us benefit from data we used to exclude as too vast, messy, and trivial.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“After just three days, the system so mastered the game that it was able to beat the prior version of AlphaGo a hundred games out of a hundred.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Our newly capacious machines can get closer to understanding it than we can, and they, as machines, don’t really understand anything at all.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Evolution has given us minds tuned for survival and only incidentally for truth.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“For example, Deep Patient looked at five hundred factors for each of the hundreds of thousands of patients”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“For three thousand years, the Egyptians held to a cyclical view that year after year proved itself to be true: the seasons came and went, life in the farms and villages remained basically the same, and the idea of progress was as foreign as soft-serve ice cream.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“in this way, artificial neural networks are like the brain’s very real neural network. These networks can be insanely complicated.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“But for the want of a nail, a kingdom was lost”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“We don’t use these technologies because they are huge, connected, and complex. We use them because they work.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“the introduction, we talked about Deep Patient, a machine learning system that researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York fed hundreds of pieces of medical data about seven hundred thousand patients. As a result, it was able to predict the onset of diseases that have defied human diagnostic abilities. Likewise, a Google research project analyzed the hospital health records of 216,221 adults. From the forty-six billion data points, it was able to predict the length of a patient’s stay in the hospital, the probability that the patient would exit alive, and more.41”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Volunteers transcribed sixty thousand words—the length of a short book—from old manuscripts to create what in machine learning language is called ground truth:”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“Iniziamo a essere credibili nel momento in cui siamo trasparenti e ammettiamo di essere non infallibili.”
― David Weinberger

“In fact, it’s entirely plausible that the factors affecting people’s preferences are microscopic and fleeting.”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility

“On the other hand, Clairaut reported that Lepaute exhibited an “ardor” that was “surprising”—perhaps surprising to him because Lepaute was a woman; he later removed the acknowledgment of Lepaute’s considerable contribution from the published text. (Much of her later work was published without attribution by other people, including her husband, France’s royal clockmaker.)”
― David Weinberger, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility