I wonder if this should be aggressively ignored these days as a fruitless path. What if we were to do a clean room reimagining. It's hard to ignore the history here but sometimes sharp turns are needed to move forward.
I've spent 20 odd years trying to piece all this history together as a side hobby and met everyone from Engelbert to Sutherland to Atkinson to Ted Nelson. I'm wondering what a radical departure could gain us.
Base it on say, Karl Popper and Media Literacy theory instead along with webs of trust.
The TBL system we currently use is too susceptible to information pollution with profiteers and propagandists as a perfect memex would also be as well as everything Nelson's ever cooked up.
We've maybe let it run its course. Kill your darlings and smash your idols to build tomorrow
That's a lost cause. Maybe not on a personal level, or among a circle of close knit friends (although it is still extremely difficult), but or the grand societal and historical level you refer to here: impossible. All you can hope for is to make dent in the trajectory of a relative isolated domain, since it will be an effort that competes with all the other efforts that want to accomplish change as well.
But better a dent in the right direction than no dent at all.
The more serious analysis is that veracity and reliability of the net are worse than they are with paper and books because the barrier to entry and distribution is effectively zero. We haven't leveraged technology to increase the quality of information, just its accessibility and cost.
The quality and veracity should be part of the mechanism.
I'm trying to propose systems that have yet to be imagined, feel free to dismiss them, it's fine.
I should probably write an article on it. But we're talking 10,000 words, probably 4-8 weeks (I'd do interviews, citations, ask for reviewers, etc.) I can't really do that here in a comment thread.
The problem with the current veracity systems is that people with bad epistemologies put us in the same place as before. If millions of people thought astrology charts and dream interpretations were more valid than germ theory than our current veracity systems would hand out medical degrees to fortune tellers.
It's insufficient. You need theory of science to take a bigger role in the design.
I'm on vacation now but when I return I'll seriously consider it.
First off, thanks for mentioning Karl Popper and the media literacy theory. Will have to look into that. I wish you the best here.
Have been thinking about the issue as well and have been drifting more and more in the direction dealing with human error / aiding human thinking by just raising the bar abit without trying to find completeness and focusing on acceptability. Fixing the stuff that should be easiest. So looking at the description of errors and and how to communicate them in a sensible way. A minimum consensus based safety focused approach with capsuled complexity seems to be the way to go.
A few perspectives you may or may not have heard of and find interesting in this context. In the spirit of capsuled complexity and accessibility with good podcasts / videos:
You already mentioned information pollution so you might be familiar with the whole military perspective, from operations in the information environment / cognitive warfare, Diss/Miss Information and missing context, psychographic advertisement, ODAA Loop and the research coming out of IBMs Watson by Juliane Gallinas with her Ted Talk about "(General)Patton in a Box" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOQkPNlTTBYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rg7uKsWlGs
If things shift into a game theoretical perspective its also always worth while reminding people that even psychopaths like drinkable tap water. There is some win-win stuff.
Taiwans gov0 (zero) is an approach of consensus finding in politics. Outer alignment is also relevant here. I generally find totalitarianism (corrupt dysfunctional systems) a useful frame of mind in terms of why consensus finding has giant benefits. Joost Meerloos "Rape of the mind" has a good description of how these systems become dysfunctional. Also https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/
Noble lies and the problems in how to deal with them are also noteworthy here.
You mentioned epistemology, ontology in computer science is a great counterexample for the dangers of aiming for completeness as well as Humes guillotine.
You might also like the stuff from Daniel Schmachtenberger on the sense making crisis. But i always feel always bad about recommending this since its hours and hours of videos. But from the types of information pollution to mementics to a description of the everything crisis we are in through the frame of finding a third attractor its quite valuable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqaotiGWjQ
Tristan Harris might also be relevant for how technology (like social media and AI) is causing problems due to humans interacting with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ
I've spent 20 odd years trying to piece all this history together as a side hobby and met everyone from Engelbert to Sutherland to Atkinson to Ted Nelson. I'm wondering what a radical departure could gain us.
Base it on say, Karl Popper and Media Literacy theory instead along with webs of trust.
The TBL system we currently use is too susceptible to information pollution with profiteers and propagandists as a perfect memex would also be as well as everything Nelson's ever cooked up.
We've maybe let it run its course. Kill your darlings and smash your idols to build tomorrow