I am comfortable with doubt and am constitutionally resistant to moral certainty, herd mentality and dogma. I am disturbed on a fundamental level by the self-serving, toddler politics of some of my counterparts – I do not believe that silence is violence, complicity, or a lack of courage, but rather that silence is often the preferred option when... See more

What can we trust? Why is the 'information ecology' so damaged, and what would it take to make it healthy? This is a fundamental question, because without good sensemaking, we cannot even begin to act in the world. It is also a central concern in what many are calling the "meaning crisis", because what is meaningful is connected to what is real.

Part of this inheritance involves a profound normative change. One of the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment was that we should apply standards of evidence and reason to our beliefs, even when the beliefs concern the distant past or future, the broad cosmos, or the nature of social reality.

Many educated people in affluent, liberal societies... See more

From the inside, via introspection, each of us feels that our beliefs are pretty damn sensible. Sure we might harbor a bit of doubt here and there. But for the most part, we imagine we have a firm grip on reality; we don't lie awake at night fearing that we're massively deluded...  But when we consider the beliefs of other people? It's an epistemic... See more