How The Web Ruined The Encyclopedia Business

prostoalex writes "Don't remember an encyclopedia salesman knocking at your door lately? Turns out, fewer Americans are purchasing layaway plans for heavy-bound multiple-volume sets (once sold at $1,400) and turning to the Web for answers, according to AP/Miami Herald. What's more interesting is that even the software encyclopedias are not selling as well, with Google changing the landscape of finding good reference information. 'Microsoft's $70 Encarta is the best seller but industrywide sales for encyclopedia software fell 7.3 percent in 2003 from 2002,' says Associated Press article."

Comments

Nope.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Science doesn't espouse things like evolution and gravity because they have popular support; they are considered scientific fact because of the wealth of evidence supporting them, and when new evidence comes to light, even well-established theories get thrown out on their ear. Popular support won't get you very far in science unless you have solid, credible evidence to back it up.

This is a myth. What counts as evidence and what does not is a consensual matter. New evidence never really falsifies any one empirical statement; as Quine argued so well, if a fact contrary to predictions comes up, there are endlessly many beliefs one could give up; which one is indeed given up is a consensual matter.

I'm not saying anything outrageous here. This has been generally accepted in history of science since the late 50's (e.g. Thomas Kuhn): that folk stories like the one you tell about how scientific knowledge moves on, however dear they may be to scientists, do not fit the actual reality at all when you look at how they work.

A key point, of course, is that when I talk about consensus, I mean consensus among scientists, not among the general public. That is, we have a social institution, Science, which invests certain people with the authority to tell us what we should regard as empirical truth. These people fight over it all the time, they do all sorts of backhanded shit to get better jobs and grants and stuff, to deny those to their competitors. They often lie outright, falsify data, etc. They write pop science books to appeal to a general audience that's unqualified to judge their work, and they fill these books with strawman attacks and misrepresentations of their adversaries. And so on.

Yet, somehow, it's still good enough that we manage to e.g. put satellites in orbit that retransmit events around the globe live.