Friday, September 23, 2016

Where Is The Truth We Have Lost In Information?

We are awash in information. Estimates are that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced every day. That’s everything from data from space probes to your photos on Facebook. Google alone process approximately 3.5 billion requests per day.

But as TS Eliot so aptly said back in 1934, “where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

From the billions of items posted on Facebook, to the tens of thousands of so called news sites and bloggers around the world, how is it even possible to begin separate it all, to know fact from fiction?

Never before in human history or human evolution have we encountered such a problem. As a result the way we approach it has to take the best thinking tools we’ve evolved and transform it to meet the needs of the 21st century and beyond,.

This is the road map for finding truth that  Daniel J. Levitin has put forth in A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age.

My conversation with Daniel Levitin: