Rationalism loves jargon, including jargon that is just completely unnecessary. For example, the phrase “epistemic status” is a fun technique where you say how confident you are in a post you make. But it could be entirely replaced with the phrase “confidence level”, which means pretty much the exact same thing.
Jargon is good when it allows us to make distinctions. The phrase “epistemic status” as used in this community does not mean the same thing as “confidence level”.
A confidence level boils down to the probability that a given claim is true. It might be phrases in more vague language, but it’s about the likelihood that a given thesis is correct.
If I say “Epistemic status: This is written in textbooks of the field” I’m not stating a probability about whether or not my claim is true. I can make the statement without having to be explicit about my confidence in the textbooks of a field. Different readers might have different confidence levels in textbooks of the field I’m talking about.
If I listen to someone making claims about physics and Bob says A is very likely while Dave says A is certainly false, I get both of their confidence levels. If I additionally learn that the epistemic status of Bob is that he’s a physics professor speaking in his field of expertise, while Bob never engaged academically with physics but spent a lot of time thinking about physics independently, I learn something that goes beyond what I got from listening to both of their confidence levels.
This saves everybody a whole lot of time. But unfortunately a lot of articles in the ea/rat community seem to only cite or look at other blog posts in the same community. It has a severe case of “not invented here” syndrome.
Is is generally true for academia as well, academia generally cites ideas only if those ideas have been expressed by other academics and are frequently even focused on whether they have been expressed in their own discipline.
If you want an example of this dynamic, Nassim Taleb writes in The Black Swan about how what economists call the Black–Scholes formula, is a formula that was known to quants before under another name. Economists still credit Black–Scholes for it, because what traders do is “not invented here”.
I use rationalist jargon when I judge that the benefits (of pointing to a particular thing) outweigh the costs (of putting off potential readers). And my opinion is that “epistemic status” doesn’t make the cut.
Basically, I think that if you write an “epistemic status” at the top of a blog post, and then delete the two words “epistemic status” while keeping everything else the same, it works just about as well. See for example the top of this post.
Jargon is good when it allows us to make distinctions. The phrase “epistemic status” as used in this community does not mean the same thing as “confidence level”.
A confidence level boils down to the probability that a given claim is true. It might be phrases in more vague language, but it’s about the likelihood that a given thesis is correct.
If I say “Epistemic status: This is written in textbooks of the field” I’m not stating a probability about whether or not my claim is true. I can make the statement without having to be explicit about my confidence in the textbooks of a field. Different readers might have different confidence levels in textbooks of the field I’m talking about.
If I listen to someone making claims about physics and Bob says A is very likely while Dave says A is certainly false, I get both of their confidence levels. If I additionally learn that the epistemic status of Bob is that he’s a physics professor speaking in his field of expertise, while Bob never engaged academically with physics but spent a lot of time thinking about physics independently, I learn something that goes beyond what I got from listening to both of their confidence levels.
Is is generally true for academia as well, academia generally cites ideas only if those ideas have been expressed by other academics and are frequently even focused on whether they have been expressed in their own discipline.
If you want an example of this dynamic, Nassim Taleb writes in The Black Swan about how what economists call the Black–Scholes formula, is a formula that was known to quants before under another name. Economists still credit Black–Scholes for it, because what traders do is “not invented here”.
That said, of course reading broadly is good.
I use rationalist jargon when I judge that the benefits (of pointing to a particular thing) outweigh the costs (of putting off potential readers). And my opinion is that “epistemic status” doesn’t make the cut.
Basically, I think that if you write an “epistemic status” at the top of a blog post, and then delete the two words “epistemic status” while keeping everything else the same, it works just about as well. See for example the top of this post.