Interesting. I’ve used the term “epistemic hygiene” plenty of times, but it looks like I’ve been using it incorrectly. I thought an “epistemic hygiene technique” was simply a strategy for avoiding getting epistemically messed up in some way, but it seems like what it really deals with is sound belief propagation throughout a community.
As for the question of what epistemic hygiene norms there should be though, I wonder whether there’s anything more to what those norms should be past what I used to think the term meant. In other words, does being epistemically sanitary with what you write involve anything past simply remaining epistemically rational with what you’re communicating?
It seems like an interesting question—how to keep the community memeplex sanitary, and avoid spilling harmful memes or letting destructive beliefs propagate—but I’m not sure there’s anything more to this than what we already seem to spend most our time talking about: how to maintain your own epistemic rationality, and how to communicate efficiently and effectively by properly managing the inferential distance etc.
It certainly seems like it may be a fruitful line of inquiry, and I’ll think more about it later, but for now I’m just trying to bring up the possibility that this question is of no special importance, and there’s nothing to community epistemic practice besides basic individual epistemic practice coupled with the ability to communicate effectively.
Interesting. I’ve used the term “epistemic hygiene” plenty of times, but it looks like I’ve been using it incorrectly. I thought an “epistemic hygiene technique” was simply a strategy for avoiding getting epistemically messed up in some way, but it seems like what it really deals with is sound belief propagation throughout a community.
As for the question of what epistemic hygiene norms there should be though, I wonder whether there’s anything more to what those norms should be past what I used to think the term meant. In other words, does being epistemically sanitary with what you write involve anything past simply remaining epistemically rational with what you’re communicating?
It seems like an interesting question—how to keep the community memeplex sanitary, and avoid spilling harmful memes or letting destructive beliefs propagate—but I’m not sure there’s anything more to this than what we already seem to spend most our time talking about: how to maintain your own epistemic rationality, and how to communicate efficiently and effectively by properly managing the inferential distance etc.
It certainly seems like it may be a fruitful line of inquiry, and I’ll think more about it later, but for now I’m just trying to bring up the possibility that this question is of no special importance, and there’s nothing to community epistemic practice besides basic individual epistemic practice coupled with the ability to communicate effectively.