The Constitution of Knowledge, Is a Real Thing

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The trick to this whole enterprise will make mistakes incredibly quickly, and we'll find them incredibly quickly. We'll set up a global network that will be able to vet hypotheses at the rate of millions a day - virtually all of which will be wrong. This becomes what we call science, but it'salso literary criticism, journalism, the law works according to these principles. And well, add something else, another great social innovation. Until then, people said the price for being wrong as you lose your job, you lose your head, you get ostracized from society. Now the price for making mistakes is just going to be, well, you lose the argument, but we courage people to

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.