Category: Knowledge
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The Principles of Reading Order: A Research Program
Abstract: Much of education may be reduced to a sequencing problem: Given a set of books, in what order should they be read? This question admits of surprisingly rigorous treatment. We can identify

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Why Encyclopedias Are Still Important
Here is a little argument for the enduring necessity of encyclopedias, despite the rise of LLMs. This will have two parts: the first more philosophical, developing principles about the “organic” nature of intelligence

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A Trip to the Library
This post was updated Sept. 18, 2024, after the launch of the ZWIBook flash drives. It used to be that a visit to the library was something to celebrate. One wandered the stacks,

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The Encyclosphere Is Greater than Wikipedia
1. Online information is carefully managed Wikipedia is just one encyclopedia, a ridiculously biased one. The collection of all the encyclopedias—that is what I mean by “the encyclosphere”—is more wide-ranging, fairer, and much

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Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
Wikipedia’s “NPOV” is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.”

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A plea for protocols
The antidote to the abuses of big tech is the very thing that gave birth to the Internet itself: decentralized, neutral technical protocols. The thought that inspires my work. Ever since I started
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Social media stupidifies and radicalizes us
Back when the buzzword switched from “Web 2.0” to “social media,” I started to get quite suspicious. When I was participating in online communities, I wasn’t propagating “media.” That is something that boring


