Science Must Decentralize

Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat

The Use of Knowledge in (AGI) Society

How to build to break the intelligence curse

See what you think

Allegra A. Beal Cohen's blog about knowledge curation, new interfaces, and large-scale qualitative data.

Erik Brynjolfsson on Twitter / X

The @nytimes piece today by @ByrneEdsal13590 highlights a concern I share: “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real.”In work with @zhitzig, we ask why AI may shift the balance between dispersed knowledge… pic.twitter.com/10vOTRj4Dq— Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) March 17, 2026

The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!

What if we didn't collapse all the knowledge from the scientific process into one paper?

The Source of Truth Problem is Getting Worse with Agents — Tonk

Intelligence depends on knowledge, but in practice that knowledge is fragmented across tools, people, and formats, creating conflicting versions of reality. What if we accepted that knowledge lives at the edge and focused instead on effectively sharing it?

The rise of community-curated knowledge networks

The Internet put thousands of years of human thought at our fingertips, and enabled billions of people to create content. At least 2.5…

Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research

Scientists are enthusiastically imagining ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) tools might improve research. Why are AI tools so attractive and what are the risks of implementing them across the research pipeline? Here we develop a taxonomy of scientists’ visions for AI, observing that their appeal comes from promises to improve productivity and objectivity by overcoming human shortcomings. But proposed AI solutions can also exploit our cognitive limitations, making us vulnerable to illusions of understanding in which we believe we understand more about the world than we actually do. Such illusions obscure the scientific community’s ability to see the formation of scientific monocultures, in which some types of methods, questions and viewpoints come to dominate alternative approaches, making science less innovative and more vulnerable to errors. The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less. By analysing the appeal of these tools, we provide a framework for advancing discussions of responsible knowledge production in the age of AI.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

Research, Attention, and Manipulation

Questionable articles can quietly move into Wikipedia and news outlets without notice.

Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet

The internet’s largest stockpile of free knowledge is under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats. A bibliophile ex-ambassador is here to help.

Landslide / Holdfast

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

The Transformation of Documents: Repositories Are the New Unit of Knowledge Work

How will documents evolve when AI agents become ubiquitous? In a world of AI agents, does the repository become the source of truth—where humans declare intent, agents turn it into executable artif…

Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:

Curse of knowledge

The curse of knowledge, also called the curse of expertise[1] or expert's curse, is a cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has specialized knowledge assumes that others share in that knowledge.[2]