I’ve been enjoying playing with the Google Books NGram Viewer, where one can graph the occurrence of words or phrases in millions of volumes of printed materials over decades and even centuries. I wondered what it might show about the growth of human knowledge, as opposed to the growth of human chatter (aka data points.) One theory of information is encapsulated in the Knowledge Pyramid, which assumes that there is a hierarchy of learning with a vast foundation of data supporting a narrower layer of information, which with time and care becomes knowledge and then, magically, a slender tip of wisdom. I plugged the four strata words into the Ngram Viewer to come up with the graph below. Judging (unscientifically) by this image, it seems that one thing that has not grown is the tip of the pyramid, the wisdom part. Indeed, we don’t even seem to be thinking more about growing wisdom, as this chart shows what might be called a wisdom gap since 1800 (click on image to enlarge):
The "Wisdom Gap" 1800-2008
While a preoccupation with knowledge has been fairly steady over the past 200 years, somewhere around 1918 (not coincidentally, I fear, the end of World War I) the line for “data” crossed over and surpassed the instances of the word “wisdom.” “Data” continued its streak, besting “knowledge” in the mid 1960s, and even beating out “information”for a while in the 1980s. As occurrences of “data” and “information” have soared, “wisdom” and “knowledge” have not. Is our faith in data processing misplaced as a measure of human progress? Or is our stockpile of wisdom not growing despite the soaring supply of available data? What’s missing? There doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between the growth of data (or even the growth of population) and the accumulation of wisdom. Maybe there needs to be some tweaking to our approach to, or our belief in, wisdom, to build a brighter future.
This month, let’s get together to see if we can wise up around the future. On January 12 at The Hub Berkeley, The Idea Hive is hosting an evening of playful and participatory activities, a brain swarm around the Bay Area’s future. Creative collaboration? We hope so. An entertaining and interactive evening? Sure! Wisdom in the making? Maybe, with your help. Hope to see you there!
To RSVP for Swarming the Future, click: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1137134199/efblike
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