Epistemic Labels

I had occasionally been adding disclaimers at the top of notes for ones that I felt uncertain about, but didn’t want that uncertainty to stop me from writing or publishing.

Then I stumbled upon Devon Zuegel’s post, Epistemic statuses are lazy, and that’s a good thing. Thank you to Joschua’s note on his level of certainty system for guiding me to this.

These posts clarified the value of this idea for me, and now I am adding a certainty and effort tag to relevant posts. For now, I’m keeping it simple by just having three classes of certainty and effort: low, medium, and high. I may adjust this process as it goes on, and I do want to make these statuses visible in the actual content of the post too, whether manually or automatically. The certainty and effort labels will be correlated with each other, but I think it’s worth separating them out the way Devon and Joschua do as well.

I recently discovered that gwern uses these types of tags as well.