Read The Internet of Us Online

Authors: Michael P. Lynch

The Internet of Us (25 page)

11
.    D'Agata and Fingal,
The Lifespan of a Fact
, 107.

12
.    Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, ‘“Revealed: Us Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media”',
Guardian,
March 17, 2011.

13
.    Ian Urbina, “I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot,”
New York Times,
August 10, 2013.

14
.    Silverman,
Verification Handbook.

15
.    Weinberger,
Too Big to Know
, 112.

16
.    Achinstein,
The Nature of Explanation
, 69.

17
.    Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,”
New York Times Magazine ,
October 17, 2004.

Chapter 5: Who Wants to Know

1
.    Priest and Arkin,
Top Secret America
, 75.

2
.    Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society
, 75–77.

3
.    Scalia (dissenting),
Maryland v. Alonzo King, Jr.

4
.    For an in-depth discussion of some of the complexities here, I recommend Nissenbaum,
Privacy in Context,
67ff. See also Lane et al.,
Privacy, Big Data and the Public Good.

5
.    Barton Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani, “In NSA-intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outweigh Those Who Are,”
Washington Post,
July 5, 2014.

6
.    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-23/nsa-analysts-intentionally-abused-spying-powers-multiple-times.html. Accessed August 24, 2015.

7
.    See this ruling: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/08/22/us/22nsa-opinion-document.html, 16, n. 14. Accessed August 25, 2015.

8
.    http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-12_rg_final_report.pdf.

9
.    As of 2015, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's official report was still allowing significant, if more limited, incidental collection. See: http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/ppd-28/2015/overview. Accessed August 25, 2015.

10
.    Bloustein, “Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity,” 974.

11
.    Ibid., 973.

12
.    Strawson,
Freedom and Resentment,
9.

13
.    Sue Halpern, “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet,”
New York Review of Books
, November 20, 2014.

14
.    One example is the introduction of contrary counsel. For some of the complications facing such a proposal, see this report from the Congressional Research Service: “Reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts: Introducing a Public Advocate,” available at: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R43260.pdf. Accessed August 25, 2015.

Chapter 6: Who Does Know

1
.    Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 47.

2
.    Weinberger,
Too Big to Know,
45.

3
.    Caldarelli and Catanzaro,
Networks
, 16.

4
.    Clark and Chalmers, “The Extended Mind.” See also Clark,
Natural-Born Cyborgs
, and Clark,
Supersizing the Mind
.

5
.    Goldberg,
Relying on Others,
79ff.

6
.    Gilbert,
Joint Commitment,
23ff. See also Gilbert,
Sociality and Responsibility
.

7
.    You might think that one way of understanding Gilbert's view—namely, that groups can literally have
beliefs
that are completely independent of their members' beliefs—is that it is a thought too far; compare it to U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney's infamous claim that “corporations are people too.” It is not literally true. Perhaps all the examples show is that individuals, in so far as they are group members, can be implicitly or tacitly committed to a proposition that no group member is committed to as an individual. After all, the interviewer example presumes that the tacit commitment in question is itself a product of the individuals' beliefs. If so, then perhaps the best we can say is that what we can loosely call the group's implicit commitment “supervenes” or is a product of the individuals' commitments.

8
.    Surowiecki,
The Wisdom of Crowds
, xii.

9
.    David Leonhardt, “When the Crowd Isn't Wise,”
New York Times,
July 7, 2012.

10
.    Nate Silver, “The Virtues and Vices of Election Prediction Markets,”
New York Times
, October 24, 2012.

11
.    I was helped to see these points in discussions with Sandy Goldberg and Nate Sheff. The example in the text is similar to that in Goldberg, “The Division of Epistemic Labor,” 117.

12
.    Weinberger,
Too Big to Know
, 21.

13
.    Descartes,
Meditations
, 103.

14
.    Weinberger,
Too Big to Know
, 23.

15
.    Sosa,
Reflective Knowledge,
chs. 7 and 8..

16
.    Pritchard,
Epistemic Luck
, 225.

Chapter 7: Who Gets to Know

1
.    Lawrence M. Sanger, “Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge,”
Edge
208 (April 25, 2007): http://edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html%3E. Accessed August 25, 2015.

2
.    Brabham,
Crowdsourcing
, xix.

3
.    Jeppesen and Lakhani, “Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness.”

4
.    Brabham,
Crowdsourcing
, 21.

5
.    Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society
, 18.

6
.    Ibid., 19. See also 179–80.

7
.    Fricker rightly distinguishes epistemic inequality from what she calls epistemic injustice:
Epistemic Injustice
, 1–2. But the two are related, as noted below.

8
.    Frank LaRue, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Report to
the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly, May 16, 2011. Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf. Accessed August 28, 2015.

9
.    Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society
, 204.

10
.    To be precise, what she calls “testimonial” epistemic injustice. See Fricker,
Epistemic Injustice
, ch. 2.

11
.    
People v. Hall.

12
.    Gordon, “Shifting the Geography of Reason” and
Disciplinary Decadence
.

13
.    “Higher Education: Not What It Used to Be,”
Economist,
December 1, 2012.

14
.    Michael Mitchell, Vincent Palacios, and Michael Leachman, “States are Still Funding Higher Education at Pre-Recession Levels.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 1, 2014. Available at: http://www.cbpp.org/research/states-are-still-funding-higher-education-below-pre-recession-levels?fa=view&id=4135. Accessed August 28, 2015.

14
.    Carole Cadwalladr, “Do Online Courses Spell the End for the Traditional University?,”
Guardian,
November 10, 2012.

15
.    Schuster and Finkelstein,
The American Faculty
, 40. See also Introduction.

16
.    Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society
, 109.

Chapter 8: Understanding and the Digital Human

1
.    Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientifc Method Obsolete,”
Wired
16, no. 7: June 23, 2008.

2
.    Rudder,
Dataclysm
, 10–11.

3
.    Ginsberg et al., “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data.”

4
.    Mayer-Schöneberger and Cukier,
Big Data
, 55–56. The examples just above also come from this interesting and informative book.

5
.    Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, 59.

6
.    Bruner and Postman, “On the Perception of Incongruity.”

7
.    Rudder,
Dataclysm
, 196.

8
.    Schich et al., “A Network Framework of Cultural History.”

9
.    In conversation.

10
.    This example illustrates an everyday experience for all of us. But it also illustrates what Pritchard calls “veritic luck” (Pritchard,
Epistemic Luck
, 146–47) or what we might also call “environmental luck.” Environmental luck sometimes seems to undermine knowledge. But it isn't clear that it does here. Do we really want to say that Google searches don't give us knowledge? I don't think so.

11
.    One might protest that if safety is a requirement for true receptive belief, then since believing X in the scenario is unsafe, then said belief is not receptive. But as I note above about knowledge, this seems anti-intuitive to the extreme. If Web searches—which are paradigm examples of environmental luck—fail to give us receptive beliefs, then we searchers know very much less than we thought we did.

12
.    Grimm, “Understanding

and “Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?”

13
.    This is a broadly Aristotelian account of understanding. See Greco, “Episteme,” and Grimm, “Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?” Not everyone sees understanding as involving knowledge; see Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding.”

14
.    Thus, understanding need not be factive, although the deeper it becomes, the more it will approach factivity. To understand perfectly, as it were,
is
factive. For further discussion, see Elgin, “Is Understanding Factive?” and Zagzebski, “Recovering Under-standing.”

15
.    Ryle,
The Concept of Mind
, 26.

16
.    Dreyfus and Dreyfus, “A Five-Stage Model” and
Mind over Machine
, especially 30ff.

17
.    Milner, “Les Troubles de la mémoire.”

18
.    Stanley and Krakauer, “Motor Skill Depends on Knowledge of Facts.”

19
.    For further development of this view, see Stanley,
Know How
.

20
.    For discussions of this interpretation, see Zagzebski,
On Epistemology
, 141–44.

21
.    See Plato,
Complete Works
: “Gorgias,” X62–63.

22
.    Dreyfus stresses the importance of experience and motivation for mastery of a skill in
On the Internet
, 42–43.

23
.    Julie Scelfo, “Kindergarten Shop Class,”
New York Times,
March 30, 2011.

24
.    Boden,
The Creative Mind,
2–3.

25
.    Ibid., 2.

Chapter 9: The Internet of Us

1
.    Rifkin,
The Zero Marginal Cost Society
, 179.

2
.    Zagzebski,
On Epistemology
, 145. See also “Recovering Under-standing.”

3
.    Kitcher,
Abusing Science
. 47–49. I don't mean to suggest that Kitcher would embrace my views on understanding, however.

4
.    Lazer et al., “The Parable of Google Flu.”

5
.    Solzhenitsyn,
Cancer Ward
, 192.

6
.    Pete Pachal, “Google Glass Will Have Automatic Picture-Taking Mode,”
Mashable
, July 25, 2012. Available at http://mashable.com/2012/07/25/google-glass-photo-mode/#SI4XL.9XkOqI. Accessed September 4, 2015

Bibliography

Achinstein, Peter.
The Nature of Explanation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Bilton, Nick.
I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted.
New York: Crown, 2010.

Bloom, Paul. “How Do Morals Change?”
Nature
464, no. 7288 (2010): 490.

_________. “The War on Reason.”
The
Atlantic,
March 2014.

Bloustein, Edward J. “Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser.”
New York University Law Review
39 (1964): 962.

Boden, Margaret A.
The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms,
2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Borges, Jorge Luis.
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. Edited by Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press, 1962.

Bostrom, Nick. “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?”
Philosophical Quarterly
53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55.

Brabham, Daren C.
Crowdsourcing.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Bruner, Jerome S., and L. E. O. Postman. “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm.”
Journal of Personality
18, no. 2 (1949): 206–23.

Caldarelli, Guido, and Michele Catanzaro.
Networks: A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Carr, Nicholas.
The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
. New York: Atlantic, 2010.

Cavell, Stanley.
Must We Mean What We Say?
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Chabris, Christopher F., and Daniel Simons.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.
New York: Broadway Books, 2011.

Clark, Andy.
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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