Diderot understood that the container shapes the contents. The Encyclopédie was a collection of facts, yes, but more fundamentally it was an argument about how knowledge should be organized. Cross-references between entries were themselves a form of commentary, connecting ideas that authorities wanted kept separate.
Posits the original encyclopedia was both a k organising attempt and a network of references between ideas, thus bringing them together
The old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon
History on the Gordian knot “The cutting of the Gordian Knot is an Ancient Greek legend associated with Alexander the Great in Gordium in Phrygia, regarding a complex knot that tied an oxcart. Reputedly, whoever could untie it would be destined to rule all of Asia. In 333 BC Alexander was challenged to untie the knot. Instead of untangling it laboriously as expected, he dramatically cut through it with his sword, thus exercising another form of mental genius. It is thus used as a metaphor for a seemingly intractable problem which is solved by exercising brute force“
Wells attempts in this essay to help mankind "pull it's mind together" for the betterment of people and the planet. How is this supposed to happen in a modern media environment which is designed to pull our minds apart as rapidly as possible?
How might the strength of capitalism be leveraged to push people back toward a common middle rather than split them apart?
Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.
How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?
How could one distribute the effects evenly?
What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?
This Wo;Id Encyclopedia would bethe mental background of every intelli-gent man in the world.
Who, here, defines intelligence?
How would comparative anthropology between societies view such an effort? Would all societies support such an endeavor?
very carefully assem-bled with the approval of outstandingauthorities in each subject, carefully col-lated and edited, and critically presented.It would be not a miscellany but a con-centration, a clarification and a synthesis.
Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.
These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.
In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project).
the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...
Sparkes, M. (2021, November 19). Wikipedia tests AI for spotting contradictory claims in articles. New Scientist. https://institutions.newscientist.com/article/2298169-wikipedia-tests-ai-for-spotting-contradictory-claims-in-articles/?utm_campaign=echobox&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter&utm_term=Autofeed
Yang, P., & Colavizza, G. (2021). A Map of Science in Wikipedia. ArXiv:2110.13790 [Cs]. http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13790
Scholars reflect on Wikipedia’s 20 years of crowdsourced knowledge | Books, Et Al. (n.d.). Retrieved March 3, 2021, from https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2020/11/02/wikipedia-at-20/?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_source=JHubbard&utm_medium=Twitter
UTILITARIANISM
Via Stanford Encyclopedia - History of Utilitarianism: "Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one's own good."
Useful encyclopedic resource for trafficking context