I see that you use/used Roam Research. It must have influenced you into developing the concept? I’m doing something similar with my own zettelkasten, trying to make it help me propagate belief changes and build gears-level understanding, so I started to identify exactly why I believe things. That means maximize Epistemic Legibility.
For example, I used to make the bald statement “carbohydrates cause oxidation”. In a Zettel note on carbohydrates, I either expand with a mechanism (“by way of sugar combustion leaving behind reactive oxygen species”), or when I know no clear mechanism, where I got the idea from (“see correlations in study X”/”see reasoning in blog post Y”), or when I can’t be bothered, simply qualified with my current epistemic status (“60% confident, 2022-02-12”).
The concept was by and large inspired by starting (but not checking) Against The Grain in 2019, and I wrote it up when I realized I wanted to be able to point it when criticizing articles. There’s an unaired podcast recording of me going “this was so great, I sure hope it checks out”, and I’m so grateful I hedged now.
I did read ATG within the first few months after discovering Roam. You might be interested in this post I did doing an epistemic spot check on the same book with and without Roam, which was only slightly before I read Against the Grain the first time.
I had the concept of epistemic spot check before I used Roam, and don’t use nearly as formal a system now as I describe in the linked blog post or contemporaneous ones, but the intermediate period where I was using Roam very formally probably was quite helpful.
I see that you use/used Roam Research. It must have influenced you into developing the concept? I’m doing something similar with my own zettelkasten, trying to make it help me propagate belief changes and build gears-level understanding, so I started to identify exactly why I believe things. That means maximize Epistemic Legibility.
For example, I used to make the bald statement “carbohydrates cause oxidation”. In a Zettel note on carbohydrates, I either expand with a mechanism (“by way of sugar combustion leaving behind reactive oxygen species”), or when I know no clear mechanism, where I got the idea from (“see correlations in study X”/”see reasoning in blog post Y”), or when I can’t be bothered, simply qualified with my current epistemic status (“60% confident, 2022-02-12”).
The concept was by and large inspired by starting (but not checking) Against The Grain in 2019, and I wrote it up when I realized I wanted to be able to point it when criticizing articles. There’s an unaired podcast recording of me going “this was so great, I sure hope it checks out”, and I’m so grateful I hedged now.
I did read ATG within the first few months after discovering Roam. You might be interested in this post I did doing an epistemic spot check on the same book with and without Roam, which was only slightly before I read Against the Grain the first time.
I had the concept of epistemic spot check before I used Roam, and don’t use nearly as formal a system now as I describe in the linked blog post or contemporaneous ones, but the intermediate period where I was using Roam very formally probably was quite helpful.