César Hidalgo: evaluation

Transcript context

…So it's possible that what you can do or how you can function isn't the whole story. Or maybe if that's wrong, we should just start using helicopters. So individual minds are limited. But what about collective minds? What about humanity as a whole? We've built this incredible thing over centuries. Right? Libraries, universities, Wikipedia, an expanding store of knowledge that no single person could ever hold. Doesn't that escape our individual limitations? So there's this dream of universal knowledge, accessible anywhere, perspective free. There is a tacit, an implicit idea there that knowledge is something that something can have while my view is that knowledge is a much more collective phenomenon. Okay? So and it's not something also that you can put in something like a book. In my opinion, the book doesn't have knowledge. The book is an archival record of some ideas that I was able, you know, to put together in a nice structure, but you cannot have a conversation with the book. Knowledge only can go to work when it's embodied. You cannot throw, like, you know, a bunch of engineering manuals and cement into a gorge and expect to get a bridge because the books don't have knowledge, teams have knowledge, organizations have knowledge. Yes. Knowledge is social. Communities accomplish what individuals can't. But collective knowledge is still knowledge from somewhere. This matters, right? It's shaped by particular questions, particular tools and particular blind spots.…

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