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So, imagine that you had
your smartphone miniaturized
-
and hooked up directly to your brain.
-
If you had this sort of brain chip,
-
you'd be able to upload
and download to the internet
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at the speed of thought.
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Accessing social media or Wikipedia
would be a lot like --
-
well, from the inside at least --
-
like consulting your own memory.
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It would be as easy
and as intimate as thinking.
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But would it make it easier
for you to know what's true?
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Just because a way
of accessing information is faster
-
it doesn't mean it's more
reliable, of course,
-
and it doesn't mean that we would all
interpret it the same way.
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And it doesn't mean that you would be
any better at evaluating it.
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In fact, you might even be worse,
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because, you know, more data,
less time for evaluation.
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Something like this is already
happening to us right now.
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We already carry a world of information
around in our pockets,
-
but it seems as if the more information
we share and access online,
-
the more difficult it can be for us
to tell the difference
-
between what's real and what's fake.
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It's as if we know more
but understand less.
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Now, it's a feature
of modern life, I suppose,
-
that large swaths of the public
live in isolated information bubbles.
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We're polarized: not just over values,
but over the facts.
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One reason for that is, the data
analytics that drive the internet
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get us not just more information,
-
but more of the information that we want.
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Our online life is personalized;
-
everything from the ads we read
-
to the news that comes down
our Facebook feed
-
is tailored to satisfy our preferences.
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And so while we get more information,
-
a lot of that information ends up
reflecting ourselves
-
as much as it does reality.
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It ends up, I suppose,
-
inflating our bubbles
rather than bursting them.
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And so maybe it's no surprise
-
that we're in a situation,
a paradoxical situation,
-
of thinking that we know so much more,
-
and yet not agreeing
on what it is we know.
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So how are we going to solve
this problem of knowledge polarization?
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One obvious tactic is to try
to fix our technology,
-
to redesign our digital platforms,
-
so as to make them less
susceptible to polarization.
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And I'm happy to report
-
that many smart people at Google
and Facebook are working on just that.
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And these projects are vital.
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I think that fixing technology
is obviously really important,
-
but I don't think technology alone,
fixing it, is going to solve the problem
-
of knowledge polarization.
-
I don't think that because I don't think,
at the end of the day,
-
it is a technological problem.
-
I think it's a human problem,
-
having to do with how we think
and what we value.
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In order to solve it, I think
we're going to need help.
-
We're going to need help
from psychology and political science.
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But we're also going to need help,
I think, from philosophy.
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Because to solve the problem
of knowledge polarization,
-
we're going to need to reconnect
-
with one fundamental, philosophical idea:
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that we live in a common reality.
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The idea of a common reality
is like, I suppose,
-
a lot of philosophical concepts:
-
easy to state
-
but mysteriously difficult
to put into practice.
-
To really accept it,
-
I think we need to do three things,
-
each of which is a challenge right now.
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First, we need to believe in truth.
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You might have noticed
-
that our culture is having
something of a troubled relationship
-
with that concept right now.
-
It seems as if we disagree so much that,
-
as one political commentator
put it not long ago,
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it's as if there are no facts anymore.
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But that thought is actually an expression
-
of a sort of seductive line
of argument that's in the air.
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It goes like this:
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we just can't step outside
of our own perspectives;
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we can't step outside of our biases.
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Every time we try,
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we just get more information
from our perspective.
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So, this line of thought goes,
-
we might as well admit
that objective truth is an illusion,
-
or it doesn't matter,
-
because either we'll never
know what it is,
-
or it doesn't exist in the first place.
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That's not a new philosophical thought --
-
skepticism about truth.
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During the end of the last century,
as some of you know,
-
it was very popular in certain
academic circles.
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But it really goes back all the way
to the Greek philosopher Protagoras,
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if not farther back.
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Protagoras said that objective
truth was an illusion
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because "man is the measure
of all things."
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Man is the measure of all things.
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That can seem like a bracing bit
of realpolitik to people,
-
or liberating,
-
because it allows each of us
to discover or make our own truth.
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But actually, I think it's a bit
of self-serving rationalization
-
disguised as philosophy.
-
It confuses the difficulty
of being certain
-
with the impossibility of truth.
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Look --
-
of course it's difficult
to be certain about anything;
-
we might all be living in "The Matrix."
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You might have a brain chip in your head
-
feeding you all the wrong information.
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But in practice, we do agree
on all sorts of facts.
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We agree that bullets can kill people.
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We agree that you can't flap
your arms and fly.
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We agree -- or we should --
-
that there is an external reality
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and ignoring it can get you hurt.
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Nonetheless, skepticism
about truth can be tempting,
-
because it allows us to rationalize
away our own biases.
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When we do that, we're sort of like
the guy in the movie
-
who knew he was living in "The Matrix"
-
but decided he liked it there, anyway.
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After all, getting what you
want feels good.
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Being right all the time feels good.
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So, often it's easier for us
-
to wrap ourselves in our cozy
information bubbles,
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live in bad faith,
-
and take those bubbles
as the measure of reality.
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An example, I think, of how
this bad faith gets into our action
-
is our reaction
to the phenomenon of fake news.
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The fake news that spread on the internet
-
during the American
presidential election of 2016
-
was designed to feed into our biases,
-
designed to inflate our bubbles.
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But what was really striking about it
-
was not just that it fooled
so many people.
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What was really striking to me
about fake news,
-
the phenomenon,
-
is how quickly it itself became
the subject of knowledge polarization;
-
so much so, that the very term --
the very term -- "fake news"
-
now just means: "news story I don't like."
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That's an example of the bad faith
towards the truth that I'm talking about.
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But the really, I think, dangerous thing
-
about skepticism with regard to truth
-
is that it leads to despotism.
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"Man is the measure of all things"
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inevitably becomes "The Man
is the measure of all things."
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Just as "every man for himself"
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always seems to turn out to be
"only the strong survive."
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At the end of Orwell's "1984,"
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the thought policeman O'Brien is torturing
the protagonist Winston Smith
-
into believing two plus two equals five.
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What O'Brien says is the point,
-
is that he wants to convince Smith
that whatever the party says is the truth,
-
and the truth is whatever the party says.
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And what O'Brien knows
is that once this thought is accepted,
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critical dissent is impossible.
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You can't speak truth to power
-
if the power speaks truth by definition.
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I said that in order to accept
that we really live in a common reality,
-
we have to do three things.
-
The first thing is to believe in truth.
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The second thing can be summed up
-
by the Latin phrase that Kant took
as the motto for the Enlightenment:
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"Sapere aude,"
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or "dare to know."
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Or as Kant wants,
"to dare to know for yourself."
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I think in the early days of the internet,
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a lot of us thought
-
that information technology
was always going to make it easier
-
for us to know for ourselves,
-
and of course in many ways, it has.
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But as the internet has become
more and more a part of our lives,
-
our reliance on it, our use of it,
-
has become often more passive.
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Much of what we know today we Google-know.
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We download prepackaged sets of facts
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and sort of shuffle them along
the assembly line of social media.
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Now, Google-knowing is useful
-
precisely because it involves
a sort of intellectual outsourcing.
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We offload our effort onto a network
of others and algorithms.
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And that allows us, of course,
to not clutter our minds
-
with all sorts of facts.
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We can just download them
when we need them.
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And that's awesome.
-
But there's a difference
between downloading a set of facts
-
and really understanding how or why
those facts are as they are.
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Understanding why
a particular disease spreads,
-
or how a mathematical proof works,
-
or why your friend is depressed,
-
involves more than just downloading.
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It's going to require, most likely,
-
doing some work for yourself:
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having a little creative insight;
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using your imagination;
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getting out into the field;
-
doing the experiment;
-
working through the proof;
-
talking to someone.
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Now, I'm not saying, of course,
that we should stop Google-knowing.
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I'm just saying
-
we shouldn't overvalue it, either.
-
We need to find ways of encouraging
forms of knowing that are more active,
-
and don't always involve passing off
our effort into our bubble.
-
Because the thing about Google-knowing
is that too often it ends up
-
being bubble-knowing.
-
And bubble-knowing means
always being right.
-
But daring to know,
-
daring to understand,
-
means risking the possibility
that you could be wrong.
-
It means risking the possibility
-
that what you want and what's true
are different things.
-
Which brings me to the third thing
that I think we need to do
-
if we want to accept that we live
in a common reality.
-
That third thing is:
have a little humility.
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By humility here, I mean
epistemic humility,
-
which means, in a sense,
-
knowing that you don't know it all.
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But it also means something
more than that.
-
It means seeing your worldview
as open to improvement
-
by the evidence and experience of others.
-
Seeing your worldview
as open to improvement
-
by the evidence and experience of others.
-
That's more than just
being open to change.
-
It's more than just being open
to self-improvement.
-
It means seeing your knowledge
as capable of enhancing
-
or being enriched
by what others contribute.
-
That's part of what is involved
-
in recognizing there's a common reality
-
that you, too, are responsible to.
-
I don't think it's much
of a stretch to say
-
that our society is not particularly great
at enhancing or encouraging
-
that sort of humility.
-
That's partly because,
-
well, we tend to confuse
arrogance and confidence.
-
And it's partly because, well, you know,
-
arrogance is just easier.
-
It's just easier to think of yourself
as knowing it all.
-
It's just easier to think of yourself
as having it all figured out.
-
But that's another example
of the bad faith towards the truth
-
that I've been talking about.
-
So the concept of a common reality,
-
like a lot of philosophical concepts,
-
can seem so obvious,
-
that we can look right past it
-
and forget why it's important.
-
Democracies can't function
if their citizens don't strive,
-
at least some of the time,
-
to inhabit a common space,
-
a space where they can pass
ideas back and forth
-
when -- and especially when --
-
they disagree.
-
But you can't strive to inhabit that space
-
if you don't already accept
that you live in the same reality.
-
To accept that, we've got
to believe in truth,
-
we've got to encourage
more active ways of knowing.
-
And we've got to have the humility
-
to realize that we're not
the measure of all things.
-
We may yet one day realize the vision
-
of having the internet in our brains.
-
But if we want that to be liberating
and not terrifying,
-
if we want it to expand our understanding
-
and not just our passive knowing,
-
we need to remember that our perspectives,
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as wondrous, as beautiful as they are,
-
are just that --
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perspectives on one reality.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)