Knowledge has become social (surprise !)

Even if it may seem obvious, this is a pretty deep MP. I was reminded of by this presentation of David Weinberger. What made me notice and reflect was two pieces.

First, his mailing-list. You subscribe to lots of mailing-lists. On each, there’s at least one true expert, even the leading one, who contributes. And yet, even though he or she is the best, each contribution is followed by a bunch of “Yes, but did you notice that…” or “Yes, I agree, and what do you think of the interaction with…”. So, plain and simple, the mailing-list is smarter than the best expert, no matter what.

The second piece was his mention of the disconnect between the reality that knowledge has become social (kids do their homeworks socially, etc.) and the no less real reality that our education systems evaluate individuals in a non social context. And that’s what make this an important MP.

Because we might indeed wonder whether evaluating students on their individual merits is the best public policy to pursue. Since most of the skills they will have to rely on in their work environment are social, why evaluate them individually ? Who’s the best employee, the one that is the best in his field or the one that motivate the ten best in the field to work together to achieve one common goal ?

Of course, evaluating individuals based on their individual merits works as a signal to find the best and brightest. The only problem here is that this assumes the disciplines tested by the educational system function as a valid proxies for all other activities, an assumption never proved.

At the very least, some degree of social evaluation should be built into the educational systems, in order to partially compensate its historic biases.

The implications are no more superficial for investing purposes, since the ability of organizations to draw on social tools to grow their collective knowledge can discriminate them pretty abruptly (those banning Facebook and those digesting it, to take the FB example). Interestingly, Goldman Sachs employees appear to be using FB the most among the big i-banks, just a coincidence ?

Download D. Weinberger presentation

MP: Knowledge is social

| PRINT