Summary and Response to Chapter 2 of Too Big To Know

 In chapter two of David Weinberger’s, Too Big to Know, Weinberger discusses how facts and knowledge have changed drastically over the past several hundred years. Weinberger states that knowledge according to the ancients used to be about universals, and that facts at one point in time, facts could be based on social, political, or astronomical beliefs. However, when the nineteenth century rolled around, Weinberger says things started to change. Theories started to become more of a popular way to collect evidence, and eventually facts moved from the realm of science to the world of politics. Facts started to become the basis of policy and settling international disputes. As time went on, facts became “the elemental truths about the world.” (Weinberger, 31) While facts themselves have changed, the way we acquire them have as well. While knowledge used to take took years and years to collect, analyze, and publish, now knowledge and facts are available at people’s fingertips. Websites like hunch.com, data.gov, and FuelEconomy.gov make an immense amount of facts accessible to anyone in the blink of en eye. Weinberger warns that this fast and simple system is not necessarily perfect. Due to the fact that anyone can access any type of information, Weinberger explains that it is quite easy to be wrong nowadays. There will always be contradicting facts and arguments that make it more of a challenge to prove a point. Weinberger also claims that because there is so much knowledge, people put stopping points to their research, meaning, if they find credentials that they believe are reliable, people will stop searching for answer. Weinberger argues that facts are no longer doing their job because there are no longer elemental truths, and the more facts people acquire, the harder it will be to keep a firm foundation of knowledge.


Weinberger states that there is such an incomprehensible amount of knowledge in the world that once we get an answer we find is believable, we stop searching for more information. This is especially true when we acquire knowledge from trusted sources with credentials, such as almanacs. We automatically assume every fact is accurate, which is not always the case. In ancient times, people actually found the concept of facts to be offensive and wrong. Knowledge was accepted because it was something that was universal and given by God. Facts were the incorrect way to use God's gifts. This concept ultimately changed as time went on, and facts slowly started to become more present in society. A prime example of this are the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus. In 1798, Malthus stated a very well known "fact" regarding population growth and it's relationship to food supply. While Malthus starts off giving us a fairly logical assumption, he quickly backs up his "facts" with his own personal bias' and beliefs. It is so simple to state your own opinion and make it seem true, even though you may not have the statistics and evidence to actually prove your point. Malthus only made generalizations, he never actually looked into and researched his theory. As facts grew in popularity, many people became outspoken against them, particularly Charles Dickens. Dickens felt that facts allowed important social issues, like poverty, to not be viewed as the complex and deep problems that they are. Facts portrayed these huge issues in trivial and unimportant ways. Facts, however, are an essential part of life today. Comparing the work of Charles Darwin and a website like Hunch.com proves how far we've come. Darwin spent years and years trying to perfect facts that he would eventually contribute to science. Hunch answer questions in seconds. Darwin was researching something that was actually significant, while Hunch uncovers and generates facts, many of which are trivial. Charles darwin was guided by a theory and only found facts that were bigger than the individual scale. Neither of these things are the case for Hunch. While both have to do with finding facts, time has completely changed the way we get knowledge. Facts are now completely accessible to the public, meaning that anyone can dispute what you may claim to be a fact with their own acquired knowledge. There is such a vast amount of information available to the world that anything or anyone can be contradicted.