Knowing What We Know

Simon Winchester

Our Take

A generous, winding history of how humans have gathered, organized, and transmitted knowledge. This is a book about books, libraries, teachers, encyclopedias, and the whole long project of not forgetting.

Their Take

With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when core skills of learning and memory seem to be stripped of all value—no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for memorization—are we risking our ability to think? In this modern information age, as we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness?

Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores the long history of knowledge and how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated it. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion—from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of the printing press, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium.

Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder the crucial distinction between information vs. wisdom. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom? Does Rene Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum—“I think therefore I am,” the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment—still hold?

 And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?

- Their Take is the book description listed at Bookshop.org