Similar to how I appreciate Prof. Goldsmith’s work, I really appreciate lectures like this by Prof. Andrew Abbott that draws on the historical and social tendency of knowledge, knowing, academic and scholarly affairs that spans over a long time. (It must require years of experience and comprehensive knowledge to be able to give a talk like this.) There are two main points mentioned in the lecture that I want to say a bit about:

1. I really like Prof. Abbott’s commentary on the shift of what we might call the societal epistemological attitude. I agree with the meta-point that technological advances and social changes influence not only the body of knowledge but our attitude towards knowledge as well. He seems to focus a lot on the shift of epistemological attitude with the lens of technological progress. However, I wonder if some of these changes are also due to general development of ideas in, say, philosophy, where philosophers propose their ideal of perceiving knowledge. (I am thinking about Kuhn, Nietzsche, and lots and lots of other thinkers who contributed to this development.) This is not to say that societal context had no influence, but rather there might be a significant factor quite apart from mere technological progress.
2. He also pointed out that there is a lot of knowledge-like content, but to differentiate. I might put it more boldly that there is more “trash content” on the internet nowadays (in fact, the very fact that the first thing that pops into my head when I think of the source of information is “internet” already echoes Prof. Abbott’s point here). The difficulty here is that it is quite difficult to tell apart genuine knowledge and not-so-valuable content, which I think is similar to the alignment problem we have with LLMs. (That is, just by looking at the output or whatever information is presented to us, it is hard to tell whether it is in fact meaningful, especially combined with Prof. Abbott’s observation that our attitude towards knowledge has become this finding-facts-as-objects relation.