EA - Epistemic status: an explainer and some thoughts by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epistemic status: an explainer and some thoughts, published by Lizka on August 31, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: .hang on a second. It’s common to see posts on the EA Forum (this platform) start with “Epistemic status: [something about uncertainty, or time spent on the post].” This post tries to do three things: Briefly explain what “Epistemic status” means Suggest that writers consider hyperlinking the phrase (e.g. to this explainer) Discuss why people use “epistemic status” What does “epistemic status” mean? According to Urban Dictionary: The epistemic status is a short disclaimer at the top of a post that explains how confident the author is in the contents of the post, how much reputation the author is willing to stake on it, what sorts of tests the thesis has passed. It should give a reader a sense of how seriously they should take the post. I think that’s a surprisingly good explanation. Commenters might be able to add to it, in which case I’ll add an elaboration. Source A bunch of examples: Epistemic status: Pretty confident. But also, enthusiasm on the verge of partisanship Epistemic Status: I have worked for 1 year in a junior role at a large consulting company. Most security experts have much more knowledge regarding the culture and what matters in information security. My experiences are based on a sample size of five projects, each with different clients. It is therefore quite plausible that consulting in information security is very different from what I experienced. Feedback from a handful of other consultants supports my views. Epistemic status: personal observations, personal preferences extrapolated. Uses one small random sample and one hard data source, but all else is subjective. Epistemic status/effort: I spent only around 5 hours on the work test and around 3 hours later on editing/adapting it, though I happened to have also spent a bunch of time thinking about somewhat related matters previously Epistemic status: uncertain. I removed most weasel words for clarity, but that doesn't mean I'm very confident. Don’t take this too literally. I'd love to see a cluster analysis to see if there's actually a trend, this is a rough guess. Epistemic status (how much you should trust me): Engaging with the Forum is my job, and I ran this by a few people, who all agreed with the argument. One person was surprised that this was an issue. So I’m more confident than usual. Epistemic status: Writing off-the-cuff about issues I haven't thought about in a while - would welcome pushback and feedback Epistemic status: Divine revelation. Epistemic Status: In this post I’m mainly referring to university group community builders. It’s possible that a lot of what I say will still apply to city / country / other groups, but I’m less confident of this. In my problem section, I give some percentage estimates of how much organizers are marketing (defined later) and how much they should be marketing. This is based off of some rough estimates, which I’m not confident in. I’d love to see someone better estimate this or run a survey. Epistemic status: a rambling, sometimes sentimental, sometimes ranting, sometimes informative, sometimes aesthetic autobiographical reflection on ten years trying to do the most good. Note: epistemic confidence is lower here, as not much time was spent looking into these relative to other areas. Epistemic note: I am engaging in highly motivated reasoning and arguing for vegn. Epistemic Status: I am uncertain about these uncertainties! Most of them are best guesses. I could also be wrong about the inconsistencies I've identified. A lot of these issues could easily be considered bike-shedding. [This post also includes: “Effort: This took about 40 hours to research and write, excluding time spent developing Squiggle.”] Most of...