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Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 90 | Wikipedia Scandal Exposed: Big Tech Manipulates What You See | Larry Sanger
00:53:53
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- [00:01]
James Polis
Your data is like gold to hackers.
- [00:03]
Larry Sanger
They'll sell it to the highest bidder.
- [00:05]
James Polis
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- [00:22]
Larry Sanger
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- [00:26]
James Polis
Visit McAfee.com, cancel anytime terms apply. If Wikipedia has fallen, what's the future of free information for people on the Internet? Co founder of Wikipedia Larry Sangers here. I'm James, this is Zero hour.
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Larry Sanger
La la la la.
- [01:10]
James Polis
Yes, we've got the co founder of Wikipedia here. Larry Singer founded Wikipedia in 2001 with Jimmy Wales. And since then he's embarked on several impressive endeavors, including creating an online library that you can fit right inside of your pocket. Larry, how are you?
- [01:26]
Larry Sanger
I'm great. Glad to, glad to be here.
- [01:29]
James Polis
All right, so let's get into this. Wikipedia really went from being the thing that your teachers told you not to ever even look at to something that most people ended up just really looking to as their kind of source of, of information of first resort. It all seemed like it was going along just fine until this. This election season, Americans got a taste of the fact that the folks at the top of the totem pole had much different ideas about information than the regular ordinary American citizen used to freedom of speech and infamously now at this point, Catherine Marr, who's now a former CEO of Wikipedia, turned out to be one of these folks who said, you know, misinformation is a national crisis. We need to care more about beliefs than about truth. Truth isn't necessarily the goal of information journalism. Was that shocking to you? Did you see all of this coming and do you feel like now we have an opportunity to make things right?
- [02:25]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, her actually saying it was the shocking thing. I mean, what we would, what we would have said, you know, 10 years ago is of course that's how Wikipedia's managers and chief participants, you know, how they think, but nobody actually comes out and says it and actually says that. They place the agenda, the establishment talking points ahead of the truth as, yeah, I guess I do have to say it's shocking, but it was the honesty of the thing, which really indicates that it's much worse than we realized. The fact that she was able to be so honest, obviously she thought she was talking within a relatively small group and didn't know that her words were going to be broadcast to an international audience after a few years.
- [03:27]
James Polis
Sure. So, you know, shocking, but not, not in hindsight, unfortunately. I mean, the whole point of honesty is supposed to be in service of the truth. So that's, you know, always a sort of cautionary tale to people who are out there saying, no, it's important that you be honest. Like, well, yes, necessary but not sufficient. So Wikipedia, is it salvageable? Can it be saved?
- [03:46]
Larry Sanger
Well, so this is a very good and timely question. A lot of people, especially those who are concerned that it's descended into rank propaganda, like me, have been asking this and basically I think so. First of all, you have to realize that there is no institutional will within Wikipedia to make it more neutral. I think that's the problem that people are most concerned about now, the fact that it has essentially become the mouthpiece of the establishment. And it didn't used to be like 20 years ago, certainly it wasn't, if any, it was quite anti establishment because it gave voice to many different points of view. But so those who remain in the system working on it day to day, especially admins and others who have a lot of clout within the system, they very much prefer it the way that it is. So they like that Wikipedia can be used to advance particular social and political agendas. Those people aren't going to change it. Obviously they are part, they are the cause of the problem that we are reacting to. So the only way that Wikipedia can be influenced to change is by significant external pressure, I think. And one can try, you can try naming and shaming. I've done this many instances of bias. I've wrote three different blog posts in the last four years or so. It didn't really help. There was a lot of noise about it in the conservative media. But even this I think has reached the point of diminishing returns. Like, I passed up a lot of interviews talking to people. You're different because you just seem a lot more interesting than some. But there was a time, not that many years ago, when Wikipedia's bias seemed to be big news, right? It wasn't to me, it wasn't to people who were actually clued into what was going on on Wikipedia. It's been quite biased, I would say at least 15 years. It's gotten really, really bad though, in the Trump years, I mean really noticeably. And I think that is what has turned people, has sort of enlightened people about the problem. So anyway, so while conservatives and libertarians and anti establishment types, they generally continue to despise Wikipedia. This seems to have had little impact on Wikipedia itself. Why would it? You know, generally, this is a feature of the mainstream media. They're not going to change. And Wikipedia now is essentially a summary of what the mainstream media thinks, at least when it comes to, you know, current events, politics, social issues and so forth.
- [06:56]
James Polis
Yeah, it's crazy. And then watching these fights among different Wikipedia editors, you know, you think that if they find the lunatics were finally allowed to take over the asylum, they'd come to some sort of agreement about how to run the place. But, you know, it's never that simple. You mentioned the word neutrality, and I want to talk about that a little bit. This is, you know, this is a question that affects something like Wikipedia or the Internet at large, or even just kind of the whole of society, you know, especially in a country like ours, where freedom of speech is. Is a thing, still a thing. It's easy to identify just real quick. It's easy to identify what isn't neutral, but it's a lot harder to figure out what neutrality is. How do you know it when you see it?
- [07:34]
Larry Sanger
Okay, that's a great question, but I just wanted to add something, a little something to a previous question. So I, I just think that squirreling away at a lot of little details, making incremental changes is still a good idea if you're really motivated to do it. And there's. There are some people who do that, and I support it. So I don't want to discourage people from doing that if they really feel moved, because, you know, it's. It's important. I have people talking to me all the time like, can you help me fix my. Aaron, Elizabeth, for example, most recently, they need help. If you want to help, that's important. It's even been suggested that I organize a mass crowd of conservatives and libertarians to descend en masse on Wikipedia. But anyway, I don't know if that's ever going to happen. How do you recognize neutrality? That's the question. Generally speaking, on the rule of thumb is if there is a debated question that there is disagreement on, especially in politics or religion, anything that will be noticeable, especially then it should not be possible for people on either side of the debate to recognize whether they are taking their side or the other side. Essentially, this is important to add. This becomes evident only if you actually know a lot about the topic. Sometimes the only people who are really qualified to tell whether a treatment of a topic is neutral are the people who know a lot about the topic, because then the actual range of Views needs to be fully understood. And sometimes it's only the experts who really have that sort of background knowledge. But that's the rule of thumb, basically. To put it very briefly, you can't tell whose side is being taken on any of the controversial issues that are mentioned.
- [10:00]
James Polis
Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting for me because, like, so much of this is about trust and intelligence. You know, it gets you some of the way. If you're a blithering idiot, people can usually tell pretty quickly and go, maybe I'm gonna not trust this guy. But there's a lot of headroom, and you can get really intelligent and you can be very well, well educated, well credentialed, have that kind of social proof. Like, well, they went to these colleges and this is their, their resume. And, you know, they, they're on all these different boards of all these corporations. They must be someone we can trust. And what we, especially over the past several years, is, in fact, no, you know, these are some of the people who you can trust least when it comes to how they consider your relationship with information and what it is that you, as a citizen of a free country, are entitled to engage in and participate in and access. So the intelligence there, the expertise, you know, that's, that's good. That's a part of it. It's, it's been a little weird to see, you know, the initial criticism of Wikipedia, which is you can't trust ordinary people to tell you the truth about what's going on, because they might not. They might just be too dumb to do it. And then we say, okay, well, then let's give Wikipedia to the experts and let's see how they do. And then the experts say, well, you know, you really shouldn't trust us to give you the truth, because there's some other values that are actually more important than truth. And so we're going to put those first. And so it's like, okay, well, if we can't trust the people and we can't trust the elites, then who can we trust? And I think the answer is that kind of trust can only emerge over time, through experience. It's gotta be a relationship. You can't figure out whether or not you should trust someone after meeting them for 10 seconds, unless they're super untrustworthy. And, you know, maybe they're even trustworthy, but they're just so creepy you don't want anything to do with them. But even so, you know, it takes time to build a real relationship, whether it's over the Internet or whether it's in person, where over time judging someone by their behaviors, you know, it sort of comes out in the wash. And eventually, you know, you make these kinds of decisions over a period of time based on your discernment, based on what the other person's putting out there. And that's the kind of, you know, it's, it's a heuristic that a lot of people get too impatient for. They want instant trust. It's the Internet. They want instant be able to instantly tell who are you, what do you believe, you know, they want to know like an algorithm, what category to slot you into. And that's just, that's a very bad interface for arriving at that kind of, you know, trustable, more or less neutral, something that's going to be, you know, fairly even handed, give you an even shake, isn't trying to put one over on you information.
- [12:29]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, well, I mean, and you also have to bear in mind that when you're talking about trustworthiness for purposes of, you know, forming beliefs, it depends on the person. Obviously. There's very few circumstances I, I can think of in which I can imagine coming to trust Fauci, and that isn't just because I disagree with him about a particular issue and it isn't just, it's because he is. Well, I'm actually repeating back your point here, aren't I? Well, anyway, my point is that there are a lot of different views on all of the different debated issues of the day. And as a result, who is regarded as trustworthy to one group of people is not going to be who is regarded as trustworthy to another. And I actually think the difficulty that we face now is that there is not just say reality is not being presented to us univocally anymore through the big three networks and the major newspapers who all seem to speak with one voice. They would like it to go back to that, but we never will. In the media landscape, if the question is which journalists or which newspapers or websites are we supposed to trust? I mean, the first question is, well, what are my values actually? Because that's going to color that. And then the second is really track record. I think I agree with you there, but your evaluation of track record is going to depend on your values. There isn't going to be a single answer for everyone. The importance of neutrality is precisely that the supposedly trustworthy people, according to different segments of society, disagree with each other. That's always been the case. That's the really subversive idea of Wikipedia in the early years when it actually made a good attempt at following the neutrality policy. It actually did supply multiple different points of view, meaningfully different points of view on important topics. And, you know, if you ask, who can I trust? And you simply accept what the trusted people say, according to you and your camp, then you're not going to be exposed to the other information. There's a desperate need, I think, for neutral encyclopedias and neutral information sources that actually do inform us about what all of the competing experts think.
- [16:09]
James Polis
Yeah, and I want to talk about your own newer projects and encyclopedias in a minute, but first, let's talk a little bit about your own experiment experience. You mentioned Anthony Fauci, just a, you know, a great example of someone who's put up there as this trust figure who ended up being, of course, something much different. What was your sort of radicalization over this period of time here? Maybe beginning with COVID maybe it started a little bit earlier, where it seems like you went from being a guy who thought that he was just kind of right there as. As kind of a baseline guy, normal guy, not looking for controversy, and then suddenly you found yourself taking positions that many people, including powerful people, consider to be borderline illegal.
- [16:55]
Larry Sanger
I didn't change. They changed. I mean, I've been, and I've been quite openly a libertarian since grad school. I've said that I'm a libertarian now. As I've gotten older, I've become more conservative. So now I would describe myself as a conservatarian. So the sorts of things that I believe now are very similar to the sorts of things that I believed 20 years ago. Now, if there is a difference, it isn't that I've changed my beliefs and become more radical. It's that I have decided to become more open about my beliefs, mostly because everybody else is now, including the. Well, frankly, what really changed it, I think for a lot of people, and that includes me, is the decision of the big news networks and newspapers to start reporting their opinions as fact and to get into opinion journalism, as it's sometimes called, as opposed to hard news. And, you know, when that happened, the tone of discussion online in the world in general, I think changed. I think it's their fault. But I will say this. I will say this because I can't deny the following. In 2019, I was talking to a guy who became a good friend about the Epstein case. He just showed me all kinds of other examples of the Nexium case. And then Tommy, or rather Jimmy Savile and Mark. What is it, Beniwet? Dubois. I can't remember. Some. Somebody.
- [19:20]
James Polis
It's a long list.
- [19:21]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, it's a long list of basically pedophile rings. And I didn't know that before. Now, I will tell you this. I didn't change my values or my views on such things at all. In fact, I reported basically graphic representations of child rape on Wikipedia and especially Wikimedia commons to the FBI back in 2010. It didn't do any good. They didn't follow up. It's still there. But yeah, that did change my views insofar as I felt now it's important to speak out about this, especially in this context. Well, we're being roundly attacked. They're not hiding their disdain at all anymore. From my point of view, it felt like simply speaking about such things as a moral imperative. And that has emboldened me to say things that I have believed for many years, like let's get rid of the Fed. But a lot of people believe that.
- [20:58]
James Polis
Seems like more than ever now.
- [21:00]
Larry Sanger
I agree, and I hope they do.
- [21:03]
James Polis
Yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about encyclopedias. Back in the day, not a big topic of conversation. Many people bored by the encyclopedia, but many people took it for granted as just a part. You know, every house has one. You know, I've still got a copy of the 86 Encyclopedia Britannica, you know, all, all lined up there. And it's almost like, you know, an alien technology at this point sitting there. We've got, you know, this, this kind of preference cascade coming out of the Trump win, probably right after the assassination attempt is, is when it started. A lot of guys in Silicon Valley, others, you know, stepping forward and saying, you know, I might not be your kind of average conservative person, I might not have voted Republican all my life, but I'm a kind of a libertarian, conservatarian kind of person. Some of this stuff is just plain old fashioned common sense. And, you know, I'm going to support the Trump ticket, which is not just Trump, but you got RFK in there and Tulsi Gabbard and some other folks who, you know, would, would, are not your, your stereotypical Republican. Coming out of that. You have someone like Jeff Bezos saying, you know, what Washington Post is, is screwing up. We need more voices from the other side in the opinion pages. We need content that's more responsive to the actual interests of our readers. People who don't want to get indoctrinated, but actually would like to orient themselves in the world they live in and then you got guys like Elon Musk out there saying, okay, you know, X is now the number one source for news. If you want information, if you want lively debate, if you want a variety of perspectives, um, if you want a deep archive of, of, of events, come to me, I will give them to you. And you'll. It's not going to be eating your vegetables. It's going to actually be enjoyable to do it too. Um, with guys like Bezos and Musk out there trying to position themselves as the best go to source of truth that you can be. You know, you can skim on the surface or you can dive deep. What's the role of encyclopedias?
- [23:14]
Larry Sanger
I don't know if I buy your premise that Jeff Bezos especially, and even Elon Musk represents the resistance, so to speak, against the establishment. I think they're definitely part of it. But so, so just ask the question again if you would, please.
- [23:39]
James Polis
Yeah, so, you know, maybe they are presenting themselves as more reform minded than they might actually be. People can agree or disagree on this stuff, but they're presenting their media products as basically, I think, fulfilling the function that 10, 20, 30 years ago, people might turn to the encyclopedia first. They might not have logged onto the Internet. They might have gone, well, gosh, you know, I'm just gonna crack open this book that has everything in it and I'm gon open it up to the page where I want to know the thing and it's going to be right there. You fast forward to today and people go, oh, Wikipedia. I don't know, maybe I'll just go to X, maybe I'll see what Jeff Bezos is offering me. He seems to run all the books and have the D.C. newspaper. Maybe I'll look there. What's the case for turning to the encyclopedia instead?
- [24:30]
Larry Sanger
Well, the case is actually fairly straightforward. I wrote about this in some depth in an article on my website on LarrySanger.org called Free Information of the Third Kind. Let's be honest here. Most people never did read encyclopedia articles much, ever. The function of encyclopedia articles always was to document in summary fashion what is known or widely believed anyway on various subjects. That's what it does. This is something that people will continue to have to do. People, not AI, not models. If the people didn't, if people suddenly stopped writing encyclopedia articles and if they left the work up to AI models, at least the ones that resemble today's, who knows about the future. I know that it might change, but I imagine what would happen that the models would make bad inferences from their training data and will tend to dwell on outdated summaries of the topic. At least that's how it works with me when I ask it questions about stuff that I actually know about, it tends to reflect a very surface level and sometimes outdated view of the subject. I don't think that's going to happen. I think academics and journalists will continue to want to summarize what is known about this and that. Now, this does not mean that Wikipedia and other encyclopedias will continue to get as much traffic as they did in the past as people slowly transition to the use especially of AI models. Like I, I frankly do look up a lot of things now by asking ChatGPT or Grok question use both of them now and comparing them. But it's still the case though, because they haven't integrated the ability to quote. It's very important to have the ability to quote human beings directly in support of their answers. Otherwise I don't believe them. Why should I? Now they have sort of cottoned onto the idea that it's important to cite some sources, but a lot of times I don't see a relationship between what the model said and what the sources contain, or it's just not specific enough. And I don't have time to go look up their sources. I'll look up my own. I can do that maybe faster than like, because these are just, as far as I'm concerned, practically random links that I'm given at the bottom of an answer. I'm talking about the links that are given at the end of an answer that an AI chatbot will give you when you ask it a question.
- [27:44]
James Polis
Right.
- [27:47]
Larry Sanger
I think people will stop using Wikipedia a lot more and they will start using AI chatbots to answer encyclopedic type or reference questions. When the chatbots start directly quoting human beings with footnotes, that's going to change it a lot. That's what really needs to exist. And in fact, I would love it if the world. Listen, I'm talking to the philanthropists now. If you want the world to have a free encyclopedia lookup service that will actually quote encyclopedia articles in support of specific answers, we want to build that. That's what we want to work on. And there's a desperate need for that. And of course it's going to exist. It's just an obvious feature. And if it doesn't exist because there is a resistance, and I can actually give some reasons, I think, why the establishment might not want that to exist. They like having a black box where they can Just like feed information into people's heads unfiltered by other human beings. Anyway, it will exist. It might start out as an open source project and again, I hope the Knowledge Standards foundation, which is, I'm the president of the Knowledge Standards foundation, and I hope that we will, you know, be funded to build this.
- [29:30]
James Polis
Yeah, this is a fascinating litmus test because one of, I think the better criticisms or warnings about artificial intelligence is not the one that says this thing is just going to grow more and more powerful until it eats the world and just gray goo sweeps over the planet and we're all slaves in, in the Terminator. I mean, I guess, you know, that you can, you can think the logic through and, and draw your conclusions or whatever. But the more powerful argument to me is that actually the way that the most if not all AIs are constructed right now will tend to degrade over time in like, the fidelity or the quality of the information. If you think of like a hall of mirrors, you know, you look in the mirror and that's like a pretty good, pretty good representation. But then if you look at a mirror image of what you see in the mirror, that's going to be like a slight decrease in quality or in fidelity. And if you do that hundreds of thousands of times, you're going to end up with gobbledygook. And that is, that is a problem that it seems like the AI guys haven't really figured out how to solve. What you're proposing is, hey, if you make sure that you're quoting people and that you have that human element in a fresh way brought into that data, then then that's a way of skirting the problem. Does that mean that you think, are you relatively therefore going to be more bullish about AI than, than you otherwise might be?
- [30:55]
Larry Sanger
I. Yes, to that extent. I do think that the feature that I, that I described is, is going to be, is going to come into existence in the next few years. In fact, I've seen one. What is it called? I'm sorry? It starts with a P. Anyway, there is one that's already making. Not a very good attempt, but it is at least making an attempt at doing that. So I think it's. I wanted to show you this. This has digitally signed books. All right? So it's the digital signature that matters. It's got 69,000 on this flash drive. That is obvious training data. And it's important that they be digitally signed because that means you can prove that they were created at a certain time on a certain server. And essentially at least saying, well, the information goes back at least that far. So there's a technical proof that can be given of that. And I frankly think that going forward, it's going to be increasingly important that all of our communications be digitally signed if we're going to distinguish between the human created content and the AI generated content. Sure, yeah.
- [32:40]
James Polis
So in terms of your priorities, then you got a few projects going on. Which of your projects do you think is responsive, the most responsive to the most urgent need that just ordinary Americans have when it comes to making their way through information on the Internet?
- [32:59]
Larry Sanger
That's a good question. I would, I would. I mean, that's not the problem that is most pressing as far as I'm concerned. But the answer to your question is the, as I say, a front end, an AI front end for the encyclosphere. So the encyclosphere is just what I call the collection of all the encyclopedias in the world, past, present and future. The idea is if we take all of those and it's truly massive, we've collected already over 60 of them, indexed them, and it's possible to search through them all@encyclosearch.org and you can read the articles on encycloreader.org you can read on both sites. But at any rate, the idea is that, and we need to greatly expand that by like probably two orders of magnitude, you know, there's actually thousands of sources out there available and with a lot more of those included in a public distributed database, not centered on the Knowledge Standards foundation servers, but distributed throughout the world in many copies. I think that's very important. But that is going to support the ability for ordinary people who don't want to sift through all that information to, well, to get quick answers from an AI chatbot. The way I see it, working very simply, briefly, you type in a question, as you ordinarily would to a chatbot, and then the AI decides what queries to make of something like Encyclo search. EncycloSearch compiles a list of likely articles where the the answer would be, and compiles a list of answers from those articles. If it looks like one of them actually contains an answer to the question, it quotes the article or the articles, then you can go from there. If doesn't have any particular answer, as is often the case, because people ask very interesting specialized questions all the time that don't, that aren't easily answered by encyclopedia articles, well, then it'll just default to its Usual operations. But I think such a thing would go a long, long way towards giving trust to models, because it takes away some of the mystique, the black box element. It's not a black box in the sense that we know what the training data is, or at least somebody knows what the training data is, but it is a black box in that we don't know how precisely the model arrived at its answer. And that's important. We need the work shown to us. That's why academics want footnotes. Show your work, essentially. Obviously, we need the chat boss to do that.
- [36:51]
James Polis
Okay, so as important as the cyclosphere is, and I think you made that case pretty well in a short answer, it sounds like there's something that's even sort of more of a burning issue to you right now. You think there's even greater urgency? Urgency? What would that be?
- [37:05]
Larry Sanger
Well, it's not different from the encyclosphere. It's a different aspect of the encyclosphere. I am worried. I don't know how worried I should be, but I am worried that the establishment has signaled in many ways just how alarming they find that there is what they call misinformation. Look, a lot of the people who rule us today really prefer the Chinese system to the American system. That's just a fact. The Chinese are very willing to make it very hard for their citizens to view certain books. What I think needs to exist is, and for that matter, encyclopedia articles. You can't look at Wikipedia in China. And I don't know what's going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, but it could cause a totalitarian crackdown that will be even worse than the one that we saw in 2020 and 2021. Right.
- [38:31]
James Polis
And you're concerned about this in spite of the fact that, you know, a lot of people right now in that kind of libertarian world are doing a victory dance because Trump's in and he's brought Silicon Valley with them, and they're thinking, no, you know, the misinformation thing, that's. That's going to be done now. We're going to do something else.
- [38:49]
Larry Sanger
Who's. Who knows what's going to happen? We can't know what the future is. Just because Trump won, that doesn't prove anything. So the. So what I think needs to exist. And this was. Look, let's put it this way. Freedom of speech is extremely important. Right. And what that means is ultimately freedom of thought and freedom of communication. All right? The free ability to transmit information and to receive information. The reason why it is such a big problem today is that the means of communication have been centralized. And so it's possible for Elon Musk and others to turn down the dial on people that he doesn't like. And I say Musk because he does it too. Right. The others do as well.
- [39:52]
James Polis
It's kind of the nature of the beast, isn't it?
- [39:54]
Larry Sanger
Exactly. So what needs to exist is. All right, so there's freedom to bear arms. Right. Or the right to bear arms. How is that really guaranteed in the United States? It's guaranteed by the fact that so many people have guns. It isn't guaranteed by the. The Supreme Court. Yeah, I mean, it is for now.
- [40:19]
James Polis
It's useful.
- [40:19]
Larry Sanger
But the thing that really, really makes it hard for them to take it away is a lot of people have guns. All right, so if you want to make sure that the books that are on this. This is a copy of Project Gutenberg, you can look it up. Project Gutenberg. If you want to make sure that all of those books remain available to a lot of people, then make a zillion copies of these things or of the books that are on them. And similarly, I think there needs to be copies of the Internet Archive and at least the stuff that's free on Internet Archive. Did you know, I asked the CTO myself, because I'm able to ask him things like this. I think anyone can really. He's a good guy. Anyway, how many copies, how many mirrors of the entire Internet Archive are there? And he said, one. The other one's in Egypt. Yeah, that's what he said.
- [41:24]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [41:24]
Larry Sanger
And Egypt. And that's it.
- [41:27]
James Polis
Well, this was an absolutely wild twist to that whole election period was when the Internet Archive just went down and there was almost no explanation. It took days for a statement to come out. It's kind of back, but not really like it was before. I think even the URLs change. There's a is, and now it's a dot ph. What the heck's going on?
- [41:51]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, I. I think that there are some powerful people, and I don't think these are just random, you know, college leftists with computers. I think it's. I actually have a suspicion that it is establishment players, and if they wanted to take it down, they could for sure. And it's certainly sending a warning that they can. I just think that's a signal that lit a fire underneath me. We need to actually make a backup copy, actually multiple backup copies of Internet Archive at the very least. What we need to do is, I'M going to have to throw your listeners a little bit of jargon here. Ocr, Optical character recognition. So that's when you take the picture of a text, picture of some text and you convert it into the actual text. So they need to take the PDFs of all of those books and make high quality OCR of all of them. Now they've done that the ones that have been added to the database recently, very recently, like the last couple of years. OCR has gotten so much better in the last couple of years. We basically need to go back and do the same thing with the relatively inferior OCR and basically make, make text copies of all of those books. Now the reason that I think that's important is if you do that, then according to calculations that I have made and information that's been given to me from various sources, I think that you could fit all of the public domain books that are in Project Gutenberg onto a three to four terabytes drive. I've got one right here. I'm looking at it right now and that's very doable. There's 16 more terabytes there and there's 22 usable terabytes over there.
- [44:09]
James Polis
They're everywhere.
- [44:11]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, and that's just in my room. Okay. I'm a little unusual. I suppose I have more than most, but nevertheless, a lot of people have gotten three or four terabytes and it actually doesn't cost that much anymore. You can throw in a new hard drive. Basically this is what needs to happen. We need to fund a project. I don't even care. It doesn't have to be the Knowledge Standards foundation, but it has to be done. We need to make a collection of the text, like the Project Gutenberg text, but a collection of the text of all of those books and as many encyclopedias and other media as possible. Right. But at least the books and get them in many copies and actually sell them. We'd be happy to build the thing and to sell the drives, but it's going to take a while. Probably take, I imagine, a couple of years at least. It depends on how many people we have working on it really and how quickly and easily it can be automated. I've worked on that a bit and a friend of mine is working on it as well. But yeah, I'm thinking it's going to take probably a couple of years, but it will be well worth it in the end. The dream is you would be able to buy a hard drive that might have like 4 terabytes and it doesn't have 70,000 books, it's got 1.6 million books. And it really does have everything that was published before 1928. Or that's actually not true. There's still stuff missing from Internet Archive, but whatever.
- [46:07]
James Polis
Do you think that, that there were things on the Internet Archive that were taken away when that site went down and now that it's up, those things are gone?
- [46:18]
Larry Sanger
I don't know. To tell the truth, I didn't, I didn't follow that event that closely. I should have. But I do know that a lot of web pages have been taken down or there's like messages appended to them saying this represents some misinformation or whatever, which announces that indeed, I don't know how much we can trust the information that's there. Which is the sad thing is there is not a Wayback Machine for the Wayback Machine.
- [46:59]
James Polis
Right, right. Well, I think what you're doing is all very much to the good. I've come at this issue from a slightly different angle. My most recent book, Human Forever, is published onto the Bitcoin blockchain, available for purchase in Bitcoin. And I wonder if you've paid attention to that side of things where you do have, you know, it's not, it's not an immortal ledger ledger, but it is pretty immutable. If you want to break Bitcoin, you really need a tremendous amount of compute in order to just start chipping away at it. Not, not very efficient. I wonder if you think that that's part of the solution here or at least, you know, one viable path to helping preserve the integrity of information in a trustable way. Not just in the short term, but, you know, far into the future as well.
- [47:44]
Larry Sanger
Well, small amounts of information can be put on Bitcoin on such chains. Large amounts of information, nobody has ever done that before. So if somebody builds, you know, the more content oriented projects tend not to be built on Bitcoin but Ethereum and maybe some others. And even those they don't actually have the information itself on chain, they have pointers to it, to IPFs or maybe somewhere else. It's typically IPFs, which is like, it's like BitTorrent. If you're familiar with BitTorrent, it's still in use. It isn't just a way to pirate music from the early 2000s. It's still a technically viable and actually very important tool that people can and should still use. And in fact, IPFS is essentially built on top of it. And ipfs, the actual data itself, that's Not a blockchain, it's just blockchainified. There are pointers to it. The problem also with blockchains, bitcoin isn't the best example of the following problem, but any of those that are, that actually store a lot of data on chain, they tend to be relatively small data sets and they probably only live on one or a few websites anyway. In fact, even if the data is on ipfs, probably the only people who are seeding that data are the funded companies that has an interest in making sure that it's seeded. And as soon as they go out of business, they stop paying for the servers and the data goes away. So there is a serious problem with expecting blockchain in general to come to our rescue because it just doesn't solve the problem at all. The way to ensure that information is not ultimately, well, the information remains available is that it be available from many different sources in many different identical copies, all digitally signed and exchanged. And anyone who is like five or 10 years younger than me and older will understand the Usenet. If they're geeks, they'll understand the Usenet reference. It needs to be like Usenet for people younger than that. And they don't get the reference, look it up. The idea was that Usenet was a really interesting discussion network is the wild west. When people refer to the wild west of the Internet, a lot of times I think what they're referring to is Usenet and the information. The discussions existed in many different copies on lots of different. Well, they were mostly university servers. It might have been, I don't know how many different universities. I think there were hundreds anyway of copies. But eventually what happened was Google took that over. Google became the go to source and the university stopped doing it. I'm sure some of them still have copies of the old Usenet stuff and who knows. But at any rate, it became centralized after that. That was one of the ways in which the university centered free Internet. That's kind of ironic, isn't it? But nevertheless, it was changed and became centralized and corporatized. So yeah, it's very sad.
- [52:41]
James Polis
Well, it is sad. I think there's. I have not lost hope yet. My attitude toward Bitcoin, which is why I did the book, is it's a lot like that second Amendment. The thing that guarantees that it works and that it exists is use. And that certainly goes for your attitude toward data and toward knowledge as a whole. So Larry, there's certainly much to be said for redundancy. There's certainly much to be said for redundancy and I appreciate your view on this and wish you success as you forge ahead here. Thank you.
- [53:12]
Larry Sanger
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
- [53:15]
James Polis
All right, deal with it. Nerd humor. That's all the time we got for now. Until next time around, I am James Polis. This is Zero Hour, and may God have mercy on our souls.