Neal Stephenson: recommendation

Transcript context

…If we go back to the world of 2006, where there’s Google Reader, there’s plenty of blogs, RSS is significant, algorithms are much, much less important — does that work well in your view? Or is the problem more deeply rooted than that? Well, I think, at the end of the day, people are not going to agree on facts unless there’s a reason for them to do so. I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it. Procedures were developed that would enable people to agree on what was factual, and that had a huge impact on culture and on the economy and everything else. And now that’s, as I said, going away, and the only way to bring it back is, first, to have a situation where people need and want to agree on facts. Your idea of this smart book, which is in Diamond Age — do you think that will ever happen? There will be a primer that people use, and it’s online, and it will educate them and teach them how to be more disciplined?…

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