think I noticed something

may actually be wrong (or worse, boring) but some of you may find it useful

I was just shaving my chest when I started ruminating on this convo with @SimianSunny

I think there's something interesting here

The idea of classifying groups by the method of generating knowledge or evaluating information

Epistemological Cultures https://twitter.com/SimianSunny/status/1304605898153897984?s=19

I think this class of exercises is (i) a major strand of what a lot of rats and adjacents are up to, and (ii) sadly, suddenly very socially important

(i) first

Greater Rationality /does/ have a bunch of rarefied--I won't call them insular, that's not quite right--ideas about epistemology

I was never much of a LW Rationalist, and I won't try to characterize their approach, but historically they've liked things like conceptual Bayesianism, prediction tracking, and timeless decision theory, whatever that is

And they spent a lot of time thinking about Bias

Postrats as I understand the grouping (ymmv) by contrast were--this is one framing--less interested in specific methods than the means by which methods are selected.

I shall give some examples.

. @Meaningness has a pretty core outline of one framework here, mulling the nature and generation of a fluid mindset; an emphasis on system selection, rather than within-system optimization

you might analogize this with game theory and mechanism design https://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge

one thing to draw attention to is that in a sense this is a Kegan 6 () essay: how do we design a system that enables people to develop to think in this metasystematic manner?

this will be important in part (ii)

Consider also @literalbanana on something called Indexicality

in one sense, the banana's essay is an attempt to suss out where certain systematic epistemology might actually be useful, and where systems are actually inimical to understanding https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1222019385834950656?s=20

here is a shorter summary of that essay, it may help to consider this before diving in https://twitter.com/literalbanana/status/1222516132759793664?s=19

a lot of what we seem to agonize over, as well, is how to avoid dying of brain worms

thinking Clearly about information systems seems necessarily subjective(??), and doing this well is difficult in an environment rife with hostile self-aware entities https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/967114911401652225?s=19

(I link myself only for variety, everyone should be aware that banana is the OG and respected as such)

(ii) why does any of this shit matter

well maybe it doesnt

hammer, nail, etc but it does seem to me that we are suffering a certain sort of epistemological crisis

looping back to the motivating conversation: it seems to me that we are very much in a sort of epistemological interregnum

traditional Knowledge Authorities--universities, media, religion--have lost the mandate of heaven

i can imagine at least two causes

one I talk about here with @collinofzion--this is an old story, but its simply a printing press-to-Reformation analogue

universities and media authority relied on distributional barriers, and the Internet broke those

this has been building for a while, and is arguably even older than the internet--look at the proliferation of alternate right media in the 80s, or underground left media in the 60s and 70s

the internet and social media in particular blew everything wide open, tho

covid has been a second and acute disaster for traditional information authority

experts fucked it up

their mandate was to predict, prevent, and mitigate this sort of unusual event and they failed

they failed embarrassingly badly

and others did not fail

things like the replication crisis and rampant politicization have been eating away at institutional academic authority for a while, but that was mostly inside baseball and a slow boil compared to fucking up covid

you_had_one_job.jpg

in summary this is what I am thinking is a major social role of our corner of twitter

our epistemological system is broken; the mandate of heaven is up for grabs

@wesyang talks about a successor ideology, but i am more interested in the successor epistemology

its not just a matter of algorithms or methods; its the design of institutions and platforms that teach and propagate such methods, their staffing, and their propagation

humans and robots are the substrates for and originators of memes

this is in short a cultural question

so: yes

rationalists and adjacents have weird knowledge generating systems

this is absolutely the time for that kind of metaexploration

let us fuck around and find us