I think this was an important question, even though I’m uncertain what effect it had.
It’s interesting to note that this question was asked at the very beginning of the pandemic, just as it began to enter the public awareness (Nassim Taleb published a paper on the pandemic a day after this question was asked, and the first coronavirus post on LW was published 3 days later).
During the pandemic we have seen the degraded epistemic condition in effect, it was noticed very early (LW Example), and continued throughout the pandemic (e.g, supreme court judges stating bogus claims about COVID just a few days ago). But more than that I think it showed what I said in my answer (in my bad English of two years ago), that epistemic conditions didn’t just get worse, they got polarized—some people improved their epistemics and some people abandoned, both in part did so in reaction to the other.
During the pandemic ideology and incentives distorted and hid the truth. Those who just listened to the established institutions were fooled, those who noticed they were being lied to had to discover the truth by other means, which meant either doing their own research or finding people they can trust that do—both requiring having or developing good epistemics to do well, which some managed and some didn’t.
I also think there’s a connection between woke ideology, which was the main thing discussed here, and the epistemic failure with COVID, though I don’t currently have links handy to support this except this podcast.
And talking about wokeness, I think it also gave more examples of its bad epistemics since the question was asked. Do you remember that month when twitter discussed whether 2+2 equals 5?
If this question didn’t have a large effect, perhaps it was because it didn’t ask what to do about it, and no followup question did either. I would like to see this discussed more, perhaps a new question should be posted. But for now I’ll say that I think woke ideology has been correctly identified here as the driver of the epistemic degradation we see, and to understand it you should understand wokeness. I researched wokeness for the last month or so (might write a post about it) and James Lindsay has been the most helpful resource for me. If you want to learn about it I suggest to start there.
I think this was an important question, even though I’m uncertain what effect it had.
It’s interesting to note that this question was asked at the very beginning of the pandemic, just as it began to enter the public awareness (Nassim Taleb published a paper on the pandemic a day after this question was asked, and the first coronavirus post on LW was published 3 days later).
During the pandemic we have seen the degraded epistemic condition in effect, it was noticed very early (LW Example), and continued throughout the pandemic (e.g, supreme court judges stating bogus claims about COVID just a few days ago). But more than that I think it showed what I said in my answer (in my bad English of two years ago), that epistemic conditions didn’t just get worse, they got polarized—some people improved their epistemics and some people abandoned, both in part did so in reaction to the other.
During the pandemic ideology and incentives distorted and hid the truth. Those who just listened to the established institutions were fooled, those who noticed they were being lied to had to discover the truth by other means, which meant either doing their own research or finding people they can trust that do—both requiring having or developing good epistemics to do well, which some managed and some didn’t.
I also think there’s a connection between woke ideology, which was the main thing discussed here, and the epistemic failure with COVID, though I don’t currently have links handy to support this except this podcast.
And talking about wokeness, I think it also gave more examples of its bad epistemics since the question was asked. Do you remember that month when twitter discussed whether 2+2 equals 5?
If this question didn’t have a large effect, perhaps it was because it didn’t ask what to do about it, and no followup question did either. I would like to see this discussed more, perhaps a new question should be posted. But for now I’ll say that I think woke ideology has been correctly identified here as the driver of the epistemic degradation we see, and to understand it you should understand wokeness. I researched wokeness for the last month or so (might write a post about it) and James Lindsay has been the most helpful resource for me. If you want to learn about it I suggest to start there.