728. What Can Wikipedia Teach Us about Decentralization of Knowledge?

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. Today, I want to touch on my favorite man, Hayek, great economist, Road to Surfdom. The Teddleton's book is based off his book called The Road to Surfdom,

but surf is spelled differently. It's very fun, and I love that. But I want to talk about something he called the knowledge problem. And I want to talk about it in terms of a website you probably all have heard of called Wikipedia.

So let's talk about what the knowledge problem is. We talked about it before, so we'll just do a real brief rundown or refresher for you guys. So Hayek talked about how the idea that people could centrally plan, that a government could centrally plan, is so absurd, because to centrally plan well,

you'd have to be able to meet every single person's needs. And there is no way that one person in Washington, DC is going to be able to know what every single person in the country needs, especially someone living in Arkansas or the Kansas somewhere, like that, where they don't know. They're so disconnected that they don't possibly

have all the knowledge. They don't have a perfect knowledge to be able to plan. It just doesn't make sense, because somebody and probably large swabs of people are always going to not have their needs met. So it's silly, like that's honestly,

that's Hayek's like mic drops. It's like, yo, you can't do this, because you don't even know, right? And that is why Mises and his theory of praxeology is so important, because it's that value is subjective.

We all have different wants and needs, which is exactly why the government should just stay out and let us and the free market figure it out. So what in the world does this have to do with Wikipedia? Well, let's get into it. So it's funny, as I was working on this episode,

I was laughing because I used to use Wikipedia as a starting point for a lot of my research. And with ChachiPT now, I don't as much anymore. And ChachiPT isn't perfect. I've actually noticed it getting a little worse sometimes with research.

And it's horrible with quotes. Never try to get a quote off ChachiPT because I have had to call it out. We've gotten an arguments with the robot because it'll be like, no, no, Patrick Henry said this. And I'd be like, no, he didn't.

I'm reading it. And they'll be like, no, he said it here. And I'm like, nope, that didn't happen. So there are some definite issues with ChachiPT. But ChachiPT, and I don't know this because I'm not a coder,

but I also, I wonder this sometimes if it takes the chats that like we have, we meaning me and ChachiPT, and if it puts that into some database where it's pulling from all knowledge, because it does scour the internet, you know,

but is it a perfect example of what I wanna talk about with Wikipedia? I don't know. The reason I bring it up is I want to definitely point out that the way we do research is changing because of AI. And so Wikipedia might not be something

that is as relevant in five years from now, but I do think it's still very important today. So what is Wikipedia? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia kind of, that's where the PDF part comes from, but it is decentralized.

It is where people can come and put in like chime in and give their own, add something to a Wikipedia page. So let's say you're looking at John Adams and you click on John Adams page and you read, sometimes it's separated with like an overview and like personal live career like separate into little things,

but it gives you all the information, but that information is not pulled from one source. That information is pulled from various sources of people who are certified Wikipedia users. I don't know how the certified thing is. I don't think it's hard, but you have to actually like,

you have to be a user on Wikipedia to do it. And I think that there are some standards for that or there are some rules. But so January 15, 2001, this is one Wikipedia launches. So it's been around for 25 years, now the 25 anniversary just happened.

And it was huge for the time, right? Because it was allowing people to come together and add their personal information to a subject, right? Because we don't have perfect knowledge, just like I said, we don't have perfect knowledge. And we're never going to solve the knowledge problem,

but what we can do is we can add our own specialization, we can add our own contribution, our own, you know, create value for something. And so that's what Wikipedia has allowed us to do. Cause it's not just one person working on John Adams Wikipedia page, it could be dozens, it could be hundreds of people

working on that John Adams page, contributing their own knowledge. So Wikipedia is now, you know, has become one of the biggest collections of knowledge in the world. You also have things like Reddit where people can contribute, you know, they're commentary,

but there isn't a process for decentralized fact checking. So with Wikipedia, people can contribute their, you know, information, their knowledge to a page. But then you also have people correct it. You can have people look in there and say, Hey, that's not true.

I'm going to make a little, I'm going to make a note that they're actually, this particular fact is up for debate. And so you can see that on Wikipedia where it's like, okay, there's actually mixed opinions on this. And there are citations on the bottom of Wikipedia so you can go and look those up and do your own research.

So it has like a built in quality assurance program where you can correct other users and make sure that people are getting it right or question whether they have it right. And this becomes very important. Cause again, it's not perfect.

We will never have a perfect knowledge. And I also want to point out that people are wrong. I said this a couple of episodes ago, but you know, liberty isn't perfect. This decentralization isn't perfect. There's going to be some mistakes every now and then,

but we should be allowed to correct them ourselves without the government getting involved, which is exactly what Wikipedia is allowing us to do. So Wikipedia is now used all over the world. And it became big because, you know, millions of people were contributing bits and pieces

of their knowledge that they were, you know, quote unquote, experts in and then people were allowed to correct them if they thought there were some things that were up for debate. Now that doesn't mean Wikipedia is perfect. And it doesn't mean there won't be some political slant.

So sometimes you go on a page and it's somebody who, you know, like Ron Paul and there'll be something really negative written or something that takes his views, you know, out of context of this, this is not real. I'm just using a sample. I can say like he hates the poor

cause he's free market or something like that. And that's unfair, right? We don't like that. We don't like that people can say things that are not true, but then somebody else can come and add to that, right? So somebody else could come and add and expand on that.

So it's good because it's not necessarily silencing, you know, certain perspectives, but it is allowing people to check that. And like I said, it's not going to be perfect. So I also want you to realize that Wikipedia is not the definitive answer to anything you're looking for, right?

And Wikipedia can be wrong, but that's why I love that there are citations on the bottom because then you can go and look those up and maybe correct, maybe you can become a Wikipedia user and correct something else.

So it's not perfect. I know that when I was using it more than chat GPT, I would use it as a starting point to get an idea and then go off and do my own research with primary sources. So a primary source would be instead of hearing someone explain what John Adams believed on taxation,

it would be going to read something he actually wrote himself on his beliefs on taxation. So it's getting it from the horse's mouth as they say. So Wikipedia was hugely impactful at the time because it was this manifestation of what the internet was supposed to be,

which was this decentralization of control, this decentralization of knowledge. And it changed the way we saw history because history and facts, not just history because it's not just for history. You can even look like facts about a movie being made.

But all of this used to come from like one source. Even if it was an encyclopedia, there was one or a panel of editors making sure that it met a certain standard. And because Wikipedia is so decentralized, you have the ability to say,

no, we're pulling knowledge from everywhere. We're kind of solving for Hayek's knowledge problem but understanding that it's not gonna be perfect which is why we allow people to correct, which is why we allow people to challenge these ideas. And people aren't getting paid to do this.

So you might wonder why on earth would anyone be incentivized to spend their time contributing to Wikipedia? Well, I never have because, I'll be honest, I was just too lazy to figure out how to become a Wikipedia user.

But I am a history nerd. I am someone who loves history, who loves all that. And so for me personally, I completely understand the personal pride or the wanting to contribute to the world's database of knowledge.

And so I understand it, I get it. So the incentives are not monetary, they're more personal. And the other cool thing is that Wikipedia is like crowdfunded every now and then they're like, hey, can you give $3 here? Can you give $3 there?

Because it is something that isn't, it's nice because not only is the information crowd sourced but the funding is partially crowd sourced too. So really, really exciting. I actually got to hear the founder of Wikipedia speak once and it was really cool to just hear his vision for it

because he is, or at least was eight years ago, very, you know, liberty centric and individualist centric. And so I have to wonder if maybe he knew about the, the high ex-knowledge problem when he had this idea. So anyway, let's just take time to in this 25th year of Wikipedia, celebrate getting closer to this decentralization

of knowledge and understanding why centralization just doesn't work. So we will leave it there. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast and until next time, I will talk to you later.