Pointing at the Wrong Villain: Cass Sunstein and Echo Chambers

David Weinberger – Los Angeles Review of Books

At one level, this is an entertainingly polite but damning book review. At another, it is a case study in how profound expertise in one academic domain does not automatically translate into the distillation of wisdom in another. But beyond both of those, the real value of this piece is in drawing out the point that in the realm of ideas, as with so many others, the internet is a place where new things are happening, not just the old things being done a bit better. We need to get better not just at knowing things, but at how to know things. How, in this new world, do we take advantage of its strengths to come at knowledge in different ways?

I had got to the end of reading this before noticing that it was by David Weinberger. That would have been endorsement enough – he has been sharing deep insights about how all this works for many years and is always a name to look out for.

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