Friday, December 30, 2016

More knowledge can divide us

Paradoxically, the result of having so much more shared knowledge [with the spread of printing] was increasing isolation along national and religious lines. The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't (Penguin Books, 2015) (orig., pub., 2012), p. 3

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