Proposal: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.
My definition of epistemic health infrastructure: a social, digital, or organizational structure that provides systematic safeguards against one or more epistemic health issues, by regulating some aspect of the intellectual processes within the community.
They can have different forms (social, digital, organizational, and more) or different focuses (individual epistemics, group epistemology, and more), but one thing that unites them is that they’re reliable structures and systems, rather than ad hoc patches.
(note: in order to keep the shortform short I tried to be curt when writing the content below; as a result the tone may come out harsher than I intended)
We talk a lot about epistemic health, but have massively underinvested in infrastructure that safeguards epistemic health. While things like EA Forum and EAG and social circles at EA hubs are effective at spreading information and communicating ideas, to my knowledge there has been no systematic attempt at understanding (and subsequently improving) how they affect epistemic health.
Examples of things not-currently-existing that I consider epistemic health infrastructure:
(Not saying that these are the most valuable ones; just that they fall into this category. They are examples and are only examples.)
mechanisms to poll/aggregate community opinions (e.g. a more systematized version of Nathan Young’s Polispolls) on all kinds of important topics, with reliable mechanisms to execute actions according to poll results
something like the CEA community health team, but focusing on epistemic health, with better-defined duties and workflows, and with better transparency
EA forum features and (sorting/recommending/etc.) algorithms aiming to minimize groupthink/information cascades
(Many proposals from other community members about improving community epistemic health also fall into this category. I won’t repeat them here.)
I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests. Please do PM me if you’re interested!
Proposal: I think building epistemic health infrastructure is currently the most effective way to improve EA epistemic health, and is the biggest gap in EA epistemics.
My definition of epistemic health infrastructure: a social, digital, or organizational structure that provides systematic safeguards against one or more epistemic health issues, by regulating some aspect of the intellectual processes within the community.
They can have different forms (social, digital, organizational, and more) or different focuses (individual epistemics, group epistemology, and more), but one thing that unites them is that they’re reliable structures and systems, rather than ad hoc patches.
(note: in order to keep the shortform short I tried to be curt when writing the content below; as a result the tone may come out harsher than I intended)
We talk a lot about epistemic health, but have massively underinvested in infrastructure that safeguards epistemic health. While things like EA Forum and EAG and social circles at EA hubs are effective at spreading information and communicating ideas, to my knowledge there has been no systematic attempt at understanding (and subsequently improving) how they affect epistemic health.
Examples of things not-currently-existing that I consider epistemic health infrastructure:
(Not saying that these are the most valuable ones; just that they fall into this category. They are examples and are only examples.)
mechanisms to poll/aggregate community opinions (e.g. a more systematized version of Nathan Young’s Polis polls) on all kinds of important topics, with reliable mechanisms to execute actions according to poll results
something like the CEA community health team, but focusing on epistemic health, with better-defined duties and workflows, and with better transparency
EA forum features and (sorting/recommending/etc.) algorithms aiming to minimize groupthink/information cascades
(Many proposals from other community members about improving community epistemic health also fall into this category. I won’t repeat them here.)
I plan to coordinate a discussion/brainstorming on this topic among people with relevant interests. Please do PM me if you’re interested!