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[return to "In Praise of Print: Reading Is Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse"]
1. hungle+V4[view] [source] 2024-11-28 10:28:53
>>bertma+(OP)
That we are entering a crisis of epistemology is a positive sign that we are recognising all produced information is unavoidably narrativization. We can't - and shouldn't want to be - certain of anything. Buyer beware and we'll be ok
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2. pjc50+h9[view] [source] 2024-11-28 11:19:03
>>hungle+V4
The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.
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3. nonran+Hb[view] [source] 2024-11-28 11:51:51
>>pjc50+h9
> you can't live like that

Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the individual, it undermines all social institutions.

A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.

Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do you really know about the relation between an LED and covert surveillance.

In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...

[1] >>42259278

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