curlicuecal:

I’ve only listened to a little, but the book “The Knowledge Illusion” makes and interesting point about how, as a social species, we store most of our knowledge in other people. We cannot master everything. We regularly have to act decisively about situations we don’t fully understand as individuals–situations where maybe we assume other people have worked out the details, or where we rely on other people to filter and synthesize information for us.

Very often they are situations NO ONE fully understands as an individual.

And I think this has really interesting implications for the way we build our understanding of the world, for the way different news sources can completely alter our perceptions of events, for the way gossip and rumor and social information works on places like tumblr, for the way we make decisions to factcheck–or not, the information we receive.