The Epistemology Edition
On Florence Nightingale, alternative facts, and knowing what you don’t know.
Chris Papasadero is a Green Beret, entrepreneur, and writer based in NYC.
Chris here. Florence Nightingale, known primarily as the founder of modern nursing, was also a pioneering statistician who revolutionized how we understand and present information. Her famous "rose diagram" (below), developed to illustrate the causes of soldier mortality during the Crimean War, was a clear, compelling presentation of data that challenged prevailing beliefs about "unavoidable" deaths and spurred significant improvements in military healthcare.
Why Is This Interesting?
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. It examines what knowledge is and what conditions qualify a belief as knowledge, as well as how we acquire knowledge and justified beliefs, how knowledge is structured, and whether we can truly know anything.
Epistemology has moved from the margins of philosophical inquiry to the center of our daily lives, especially when dealing with Artificial Intelligence and Alternative Facts. What constitutes justified belief in a world of LLM hallucinations, algorithmic steering, and viral misinformation?
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It's not just about accumulating information—we have more of that at our fingertips than ever before. Rather, it's about developing a strong signal-to-noise filter, and balancing skepticism with the real need to form actionable decisions.
This is easier said than done, but one trick is to simply keep the traditional epistemic virtues—critical thinking, empirical verification, logical consistency—in your arsenal at all times. Beyond those, here are five more epistemic tools for your cognitive go-bag:
Epistemic humility: Recognize the limits of our knowledge and remain open to new evidence.
Falsifiability: Seek claims that can be proven false, as they are more likely to be scientifically robust.
Occam's Razor: Prefer simpler explanations that require fewer assumptions when faced with competing hypotheses.
Metacognition: Regularly check thinking for common biases like confirmation bias or the availability heuristic.
Steelmanning: Argue against the strongest form of an opponent's argument, not just the easiest to refute.
Bayesian thinking: Update beliefs incrementally as new evidence emerges, rather than in binary "right" or "wrong" terms.
Check your priors! (CP)
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Thanks for reading,
Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Chris (CP)
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Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) with editing help from Louis Cheslaw about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.
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