Making Sense of The Internet is The Defining Problem of Our Era

& Epistemic Wellbeing

I’ve been thinking about a variety of problems that need solving within social, technical and geopolitical landscapes. What I keep coming back to is the fact that the internet mediates all of them, either directly or indirectly. We are using the internet as a sense making mechanism for communication and learning, but the problem is the internet is a mess. It is a deep dark abyss flooded with more information than anyone can make sense of and the content is being negatively influenced from a variety of factors, not always in bad faith, but the result can be the same.

The defining problem then becomes, how do we make sense of it? What tool, what social rules or habits need to be in place for individuals to most effectively use the greatest thing ever made my humans. We are in desperate need of norms around digital diets and a suit of tools that can help sift through the madness. The digital std’s, ads and misinformation are out of control. It isn’t going to be done by independent fact checkers, as uncomfortable as many people are with this line of thinking “facts” are much harder to decipher than we like to imagine the collective intelligence has deemed. We need a dialectic style of knowledge generation moving forward. The best scientist and thinkers are already doing this in their networks, but that norm has yet to trickle down to the rest of the population’s understanding of how knowledge and science actually works. I’m not confident we'll be able to solve the rest of the problems on our hands without stabilizing our communication through the internet first and increasing the general epistemic wellbeing of society.

“Epistemic wellbeing is your reasonably based sense that you’ll be able to know what you want and need to know about the world in order for your life to go well. This could involve knowledge in general – you want to feel like you can find answers to questions that you think are important to satiate your curiosity – as well as knowing more specific things – there will be some things you need to know in order to accomplish your life’s projects. If you have access to lots of good sources of information and can get your questions answered when you need them, then you have a high degree of epistemic wellbeing. If, on the other hand, you’re surrounded by liars, or just have no way of finding out what you need to know, you’re not doing nearly as well.

There are three components of epistemic wellbeing: access to truths; access to trustworthy sources of information; and opportunities to participate in productive dialogue. Let’s think about these each in turn.

When you’re presented with information or looking for answers to questions, you want to be confident that what you’re getting is the truth. Access to truth, the first component, is the basis of epistemic wellbeing. Access might be thwarted in many ways: you might be unable to go online, books might be banned, important information could be redacted. Or, in less extreme cases, you might be presented with different media outlets presenting conflicting information about an event. In this case, you might feel that you’re being prevented from accessing truths insofar as you’re unable to determine which information being presented is correct.”

— Kenneth Boyd

If you want to read the full article quoted above - The Antidote to fake news is to nourish our epistemic wellbeing”

On the bright side, the podcast and substack world are making access to high quality information in almost any domain a lot easier. It feels like we are in a moment where society is generally leveling up for that reason. In my opinion there are real signs for hope.

I will be writing a piece in the future breaking down my map for different tech stack religions or digital diets that people can use, which will allow us to better discuss potential paths forward I believe and how to make sense of the internet.