Laurie Niestrath's List: Adlt 641 Project

• As knowledge is networked, we lose our means of ordering it, or rather it can be ordered in many different ways at once.
• no edges. "No edges means no shape. And no shape means that networked knowledge lacks what we have long taken to be essential to the structure of knowledge: a foundation"
• networking of knowledge changes our idea of leadership, decision-making, and creativity itself.
• "Traditional institutions need to be fierce contributors to the Net if our new infrastructure is to move us toward knowledge and not dazed ignorance"
• the problem of privacy and the way that so many of our platforms for networking and sharing knowledge are actually data-gathering and influence-hoarding devices.
• "free" access to networks is actually paid for through the constant leakage of personal information.
• complex, shifting, destabilized, and boundary-free set of ideas and talk about them in a way that makes them connect in a way that gives them coherent shape.
• I fear any sort of belief that the old forms of expertise (and even corners) is dead, replaced by the expertise of the crowd. 

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• There are facts. The world is one way and not all the other ways that it isn’t. You are not free to make up your own facts.
• The basing of knowledge primarily on facts is a relatively new phenomenon. (3) I explicitly invoked Heidegger’s concept of truth, with a soupçon of pragmatism’s view of truth as a tool intended to serve a purpose.
• The world shows itself to us as independent of us
• no one on the list suggests that the existence of the universe depends upon our awareness of it, although some are puzzled about how to maintain Heidegger’s conception of “world” (which does seem to depend on us) with that which survives our awareness of it. Heidegger, after all, offers phenomenological ontology, so there is a question about what Being looks like when there is no one to show itself to.)
• Heidegger’s notion that truth is the world showing itself to us, and it shows itself to us differently depending on our projects.
• ’ve always liked this idea for a few reasons.
• truth is the way the world shows itself,
• this sense of truth look at our projects, it contains the crucial acknowledgement that truth is not independent of our involvement in the world (which Heidegger accurately characterizes not with the neutral term “involvement” but as our caring about what happens to us and to our fellow humans)
• our mental images can either match or fail to match external reality.
• different fields have different methodologies for revealing the truth of the world. He speaks coldly (it seems to me) of science, and warmly of poetry. I’m much hotter on science. Science provides a methodology for letting the world show itself (= truth) that is reproducible precisely so that we can settle disputes.
• we are talking about the fragmenting of belief that the Internet facilitates, and the fact that facts no longer settle arguments across those gaps, then it is especially important that we commit to science as the discipline that allows the earth to speak of itself in its most compelling terms.
• not simply hold on to true statements, but is aware of the methodology that led us to see those statements as true. This type of meta awareness — not just within the realm of science — is crucial for a medium as open as the Internet.

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