Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge (National Affairs) opened my eyes to how we know what we know.
Here are the top 10 points I got from his article:
- Social epistemology is about our public understanding of objective reality.
- Reality-making was decentralized away from authoritarian control.
- This decentralized community relies on free speech and social testing.
- Decentralizing our understanding of reality gives us freedom of thought.
- The decentralized community must agree on how objective reality is proven (and can disagree on everything else).
- Disinformation tries to tear down socially validated reality.
- The epistemic honor code says that objective truth exists, truth-finding should be impersonal, credentials matter and knowledge should always be tested.
- Disinformation became weaponized (Russia election interference), profitable (social media) and impossible to ignore (top politicians cannot be ignored).
- Creating knowledge is a professional, structured and disciplined process.
- Institutions that create knowledge should be fixed not disregarded and thrown out.