But more important where the destruction of the institutions that supposedly steward the development of knowledge is concerned, he said, is the Web’s ever-changing structure of links, which undermines hierarchical analysis by allowing everyone to see and contribute different points of view. “In a highly-connected medium we would expect knowledge to change. And it does,” he said, “the knowledge lives in webs and networks as it has in books.”While that can lead to speedy analysis, Mr. Weinberger said, it also means we live in a world of continual change and situational thinking. Every understanding is open to change, a kind of point of view that can be undermined by a non-expert with a persuasive argument. Even top researchers now acknowledge this, he noted: Recent claims that neutrinos travel faster than light are both posted and debated in places like arXiv.org, without the traditional process of peer-review. “It did not respect professional credentials,” the Harvard researcher said.
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