epistemics

The quality of a person's skills in epistemology ― cognitive bias compensation, scientific skepticism toward oneself and others, bullshit like that. Associated with reasonableness, curiosity, empiricism, a burning for learning, obsessive devotion to evidence as the arbiter of truth, mental modeling skills, high-rung thinking, evenhandedness, honesty, humility, a love of simplicity, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, game-theoretic analysis, statistical literacy, and other junk the human race hasn't figured out yet.

"Oh, I do ClearerThinking quizzes most days to boost my epistemics. Plus I read Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality and LessWrong, to help me be cool like Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander and those other navel-gazing windbags I never read like... Immanuel Kant? Whatever, point is, all humans are morons until they learn how to think. So I'm trying to learn how to be a bit less mind-bogglingly stupid than average."

epistemics by TheNakedBum January 24, 2024

Epistemic Status 

Culture of origin: lesswrong-adjacent blogging communities

The epistemic status is a short disclaimer at the top of a post that explains how confident the author is in the contents of the post, how much reputation the author is willing to stake on it, what sorts of tests the thesis has passed.

It should give a reader a sense of how seriously they should take the post.

It had "Epistemic Status: Wild off-the-cuff speculation" so I didn't bother to read it. It seemed entertaining, just didn't have time.

He said "Epistemic Status: Would bet at 30:1 odds in favour of the thesis and I probably one of the top 100 theorists in the intersection of the relevant fields" but it still seemed completely insane to me. Heads better roll if/when it turns out to be wrong. Like, I mean it, he should lose all of his social capital. People should stop reading his blog and his eigenkarma should be reset (If he's somehow right though I will be very impressed)

"Epistemic Status: Fiction"

Epistemic Status by 7154b22954f68d626c891921a6a5e0 January 12, 2019

Epistemic 

A stand-in name for a generally very cool guy, liked by all.

Oh I really liked him, he's very Epistemic like.

Epistemic by Bing Chilling The Third February 4, 2023

epistemizzle

gangsta for epistemology

Yo, epistemizzle is all about the brizzle in the vizzle

epistemizzle by Frankenstizzle September 29, 2009

Epistemicide

The killing of knowledge systems. Not just the loss of individual facts, but the systematic destruction of entire ways of knowing—languages, indigenous sciences, local healing traditions, alternative frameworks for understanding the world. Epistemicide happens when colonialism erases native astronomy, when globalization flattens local agricultural knowledge, when academia declares that only certain methods produce "real" knowledge. It's murder by attrition: a thousand small dismissals that together silence ways of understanding that evolved over millennia. The tragedy isn't just the lost information—it's the lost ways of arriving at information.

"When the missionaries came, they didn't just bring a new religion—they brought a new way of knowing that made our elders' knowledge sound like superstition. That wasn't conversion; that was Epistemicide."

Epistemicide by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 22, 2026

Epistemic violence

Often used interchangeably with epistemological violence, but sometimes with a narrower focus on the harm done through silencing, misrepresentation, or exclusion of marginalized knowers. It includes: denying someone credibility because of their identity (epistemic injustice), forcing a group to speak in a dominant language (linguistic violence), or erasing their contributions from history. Epistemic violence maintains power hierarchies by controlling who is heard and what counts as knowledge. It is a central concept in decolonial and feminist epistemology.

Epistemic violence Example: “The peer reviewers rejected the indigenous scholar’s paper because it used oral testimony as evidence. That epistemic violence: imposing Western evidentiary standards to silence other ways of knowing.”

Epistemic violence by Abzugal June 5, 2026

21st Century Epistemicide

The ongoing, accelerated destruction of diverse knowledge systems in the digital age, driven by algorithms, platform monopolies, and the attention economy. If historical epistemicide was missionaries burning libraries, 21st Century Epistemicide is the recommendation algorithm burying everything outside its optimized categories. It's Wikipedia in English becoming the default "truth" while oral traditions vanish. It's Twitter amplifying hot takes while erasing context. It's the subtle, continuous message that if your knowledge isn't searchable, quantifiable, and algorithm-friendly, it doesn't count. The killing is cleaner now—no smoke, just silence.

"My grandmother's herbal remedies don't have a Wikipedia page, so my nephew Googles his symptoms and trusts the first result. That's 21st Century Epistemicide: a thousand years of knowledge erased because it couldn't be SEO-optimized."

21st Century Epistemicide by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal February 22, 2026