[Feature Idea] Epistemic Status

I would support this initiative on the condition that list of epistemic statuses is not freeform text. A list of confidence levels, plus options like "log" or "review" for opinion pieces would serve the original purpose of epistemic status -- allowing an author to write confidently and forthrightly about conclusions while still indicating that they're not 100% sure about those conclusions.

Allowing freeform text, however, would lead to epistemic statuses like:

• "Casual" [LW · GW]
• "political, opinionated, personal, all the typical caveats for controversial posts" [LW · GW]
• Whatever on earth this is

We must remember that the original purpose of epistemic status was to increase the legibility of posts. The hope was that by introducing a standard set of words indicating confidence, one could quickly and easily share and compare the confidence that one had in their conclusions, facilitating the process of reaching agreement. Epistemic statuses, as they're actually used in the community, are the opposite of that. Most of the time, I ignore them, because they don't add to the content of the post, and just serve as a bonus field for the author to signal how witty and subversive they are.

The introduction of an epistemic standard field for LessWrong posts represents a chance to reclaim the concept and reimplement it in the manner that it was originally meant to be. We should not squander this opportunity.

Edit (2018-08-22): it turns out that one of my friends has an entire tumblr of non-epistemic epistemic statuses.

a multiple-choice field with a few specific options, most likely being: [Empty, Exploratory, My Best Guess, Authoritative]

Have you checked that these labels are good matches for a sample of existing posts?

It seems (Epistemic) Status refers to post headers with a variety of purposes:

Idea Status (I believe this/I don't, but I'm open to more information/someone else might find this useful/ this is completely theory/brainstorming etc.)

Knowledge Status (I'm pretty sure I understand general relativity/the history of science/This is what I do for a living.)

Confidence with which post is written. (I find it easier to write with confidence than not / I wrote a fictional story to explain this thing in philosophy/science.)

Science/Current Events (I'm pretty sure general relativity is right / this field of science is growing and more up to date information will always supersede it / This is psychology, (link to replication crisis), so...)

Legal disclaimers (I am not a nutritionist/neuroscientist/do not try this at home, do not sue me if you do)

Subject Metadata/Instructions (Don't read this if you don't want to read politics/heavy topology math post/This is an experiment, if you name starts with the letter J click here(link), write down your answer to questions before reading onward, etc.)

Which brings us to another feature: Updates. (Sometimes their own post, sometimes added to the bottom or top of the post, possibly with a link to important comments.)

These can be updates on

-events ("This drug...looked really good, but it didn't make it out of trials." )

-predictions ("My prediction was correct/falsified/is now being tested!")

-beliefs/knowledge ("I have changed my mind, thank you for engaging with this idea/we had an expert weigh in (link to comments)")

-prior work ("I reinvented the wheel, here's what it's called (link to wikipedia page)." )

-later work ("I've written a better introduction to this subject here (link)", etc.)

I would use this feature because there is a trade-off between using an epistemic status and losing valuable preview real estate to encourage people to read your posts. Currently I've taken to inserting notes after the first paragraph.

It's a cost. If it's not freeform, it will lose nuance, which I would find annoying, like those multiple-choice tests where every option is at least slightly wrong, and you are being forced to affirm one of them. If it's freeform, the only benefit is a reminder. A freeform field that is optional won't cost much, but a reminder doesn't need to be a field on the submission form.

I suppose a major consideration for this is that it wouldn't necessarily interface well with authors who primarily post on other sites (Zvi, Scott Alexander, Sarah Constantin and Benquo and Jacob come easily to mind), since they wouldn't have the epistemic status in their original post, and would have to edit it in on LW.

I dislike the idea, although it may be because I find the whole notion of "epistemic status" as front-matter a little off-putting because it's weird and often feels to me like copying a think Scott does. That said, I've been known to start my writing with an apology that I use to set expectations in general and that might include setting expectations about my confidence of the enclosed ideas.

So now that I say all that I think a fair read of my opinion is "just be a better writer and address those things within the body of the text instead of adding metadata". That may not be, of course, be in line with the direction you want to take LW.

1. I really like the idea! I think epistemic statuses are really useful to readers, and I think that they can often times make authors feel comfortable writing things that they otherwise wouldn't write. Ie. I think a lot of people are hesitant to post things that aren't authoritative. But if there was an explicit field for "exploratory" or "my best guess", it is obvious that "oh, ok, I'm allowed to write something like that".

Another thing I like is that it can make the writing smoother. Without epistemic statuses, it can be tempting to have a lot of "I have a reasonably strong impression"-like qualifiers throughout a post. Whereas with an epistemic status of My Best Guess, you could probably leave out most of those qualifiers while still communicating that your statements are reasonably strong impressions, rather than statements of truth.

2. Although I like the idea, I don't think it's completely obvious that it's a good feature to include. However, I feel pretty confident in saying that it's worth running an experiment on. Maybe try it out for a month and see how it goes. If people aren't liking it you leave users slightly frustrated for a month. But if it does work, I think the upside is pretty large, and it is multiplied across a much larger period of time. I guess the same arguments could be made for most potential features - and I think that there are many things worth experimenting with! - but I think this one is particularly high upside, in contrast to something like a UI change I guess.

3. I think that there should be an option for a freeform epistemic status, eg. one that isn't Empty, Exploratory, My Best Guess or Authoritative. Sometimes the epistemic status doesn't quite fit in to one of those buckets. In general, I think it's pretty hard to predict in advance what all of the possible buckets for things are. And so I feel especially strongly about this as a ways to start off. Perhaps after a few months of use, if it is clear that Empty, Exploratory, My Best Guess and Authoritative are the buckets, it would be appropriate to get rid of the freeform option, but it seems prudent to test it out before making that assumption.

I suppose the big downside to this is that, with a freeform field, authors may say confusing things, whereas if there wasn't a freeform field, they would have to choose something (and then perhaps add additional text to their choice), and that would be easier for readers. I don't see this as a big downside because I think that authors on LessWrong are pretty capable as writers. Of course, they're not perfect and there will be moments of confusion, but overall I don't think there will be too much. And I think that issue can be addressed in other ways.

4. I agree that there are times when epistemic statuses are used to be witty and clever rather than clearly communicate the epistemic status, but I haven't found this to be a big problem at all. And when it is a problem, you can easily skim/skip through it.

Given the rise of AI-generated content, would it be appropriate to add a "Synthetic" or "Machine-Generated" status? Or, I guess to be fair to (future) machines that can make their own assessments of epistemic status, we should just list machines as contributors. 

Reading random posts I saw a pattern of these epistemic statuses but they seemed very confusing and illeigble for me. It was not obvoius how they should be taken and how one would go about leaning what they mean.

I came across as "I don't know what these people are doing, so I can't really participate".

Reading some of the older comments here it seems there was an idea of providing some sort of clarity and it seems what is going on now really doesn't provide what was sought after (maybe a bit seprate question whether providing that is a good idea in the first place).