Levels of certainty and effort

Background

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 not just 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.

My Usage

References

• Epistemic statuses are lazy, and that’s a good thing.

• Joschua’s note on his level of certainty system

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