The word “epistemic” is philosophy jargon. The phrase “epistemic status” in the link you gave isn’t a separate piece of jargon, it’s just the normal word “status” modified by the word “epistemic”.
The original comment I was replying to said:
“A minor gripe I have about LW, and EA by extension, is that words with a specific meaning in philosophy are misused and therefore take on a different meaning – take “epistemic status”, which has grown out of its original intended meaning of how confident one is in one’s claim and is now used more to describe someone’s background and raise general caveats and flags for where someone might have blind spots.”
If the claim is that rationalists are misusing the word “epistemic”, not some specific unfamiliar-to-me new piece of jargon (“epistemic status”), then the claim is based on a misunderstanding of the word “epistemic”. Epistemic in philosophy means “pertaining to knowledge (belief justification, reliability, accuracy, reasonableness, warrant, etc.)”, not “pertaining to confidence level”.
Someone’s “epistemic status” includes what they believe and how strongly they believe it, but it also includes anything that’s relevant to how justified, reasonable, supported, based-on-reliable-processes, etc. your beliefs are. Like, “epistemic status: I wrote this whole hungry, which often makes people irritable and causes them to have more brain farts, which reduces the expected reliability and justifiedness of the stuff I wrote” is totally legit. And if people have the background knowledge to understand why you might want to flag that you were hungry, it’s completely fine to write “epistemic status: written while hungry” as a shorthand.
(I do think rationalists sometimes put other stuff under “epistemic status” as a joke, but “rationalists joke too much” is a different criticism than “rationalists have their own nonstandard meaning for the word ‘epistemic’”.)
The word “epistemic” is philosophy jargon. The phrase “epistemic status” in the link you gave isn’t a separate piece of jargon, it’s just the normal word “status” modified by the word “epistemic”.
The original comment I was replying to said:
“A minor gripe I have about LW, and EA by extension, is that words with a specific meaning in philosophy are misused and therefore take on a different meaning – take “epistemic status”, which has grown out of its original intended meaning of how confident one is in one’s claim and is now used more to describe someone’s background and raise general caveats and flags for where someone might have blind spots.”
If the claim is that rationalists are misusing the word “epistemic”, not some specific unfamiliar-to-me new piece of jargon (“epistemic status”), then the claim is based on a misunderstanding of the word “epistemic”. Epistemic in philosophy means “pertaining to knowledge (belief justification, reliability, accuracy, reasonableness, warrant, etc.)”, not “pertaining to confidence level”.
Someone’s “epistemic status” includes what they believe and how strongly they believe it, but it also includes anything that’s relevant to how justified, reasonable, supported, based-on-reliable-processes, etc. your beliefs are. Like, “epistemic status: I wrote this whole hungry, which often makes people irritable and causes them to have more brain farts, which reduces the expected reliability and justifiedness of the stuff I wrote” is totally legit. And if people have the background knowledge to understand why you might want to flag that you were hungry, it’s completely fine to write “epistemic status: written while hungry” as a shorthand.
(I do think rationalists sometimes put other stuff under “epistemic status” as a joke, but “rationalists joke too much” is a different criticism than “rationalists have their own nonstandard meaning for the word ‘epistemic’”.)