Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
There&#x27;s a well-known narrative that before the Internet, for all of human history, information was scarce and humans found ways to adapt; and since the Internet, information has been overwhelming and humans must find different ways to adapt.<p>What is disappointing to me is that, with so many more options, people have not adapted by utilizing only the best information. Anyone can read the best sources (with a major exception; see below), but instead they choose more and more crap and now even actively delegitimize the better sources in favor of propaganda. In other words, why hasn&#x27;t the vastly increased competition in the marketplace of ideas yielded far superior knowledge? <i>Epistemology</i> should be one of the hottest words and hottest subjects of the day.<p>I hypothesize that it&#x27;s a failure of the intellectual elite. Instead of spreading their incredible wealth to the world over this new medium, they kept it to themselves behind high paywalls (science journals, OED, JSTOR, etc.). And instead of defending the values of and passion for knowledge and intellect, of the Enlightenment, scholarship, and reason, many I see and talk to adopt the trendy anti-intellectualism, bizarrely undermining their own reason for being.<p>I know many people will say that they can get a dictionary for free, why use the OED. The problem is that those who know better are not standing up to assert why it is superior, necessary, and incredibly valuable to the world.