Epistemic Crisis

What is the “epistemic crisis”?

The phrase refers to a broad loss of confidence in society’s ability to establish, share, and act on reliable knowledge. Writers describe a situation in which major institutions—government agencies, universities, legacy media, scientific journals, and big-tech platforms—no longer command the public trust they once enjoyed, while new information channels (social media, Substack, podcasts, partisan outlets) have not yet developed stable norms for verifying claims. As a result, citizens face an environment “in which the ground rules for knowing what is true are themselves in dispute” [1][2][5].

What caused the crisis?

Several interacting forces are identified:

Institutional performance problems. Repeated policy, scientific, and journalistic errors created a feedback loop of distrust [3][4][7][10]. Incentive drift inside elite organizations. Newsrooms and academia are said to reward ideological conformity, audience capture, or prestige more than empirical accuracy [7][11]. Shifting information technology. The internet fractured gatekeeping; anyone can publish, while traditional outlets lost both revenue and agenda-setting power [1][12]. Social-psychological factors. Motivated reasoning, group polarisation, and status competition make it harder for people—even experts—to update on new evidence [2][5][6]. The replication crisis. Large shares of celebrated findings in psychology, medicine, and social science fail to replicate, weakening faith in “peer review” as a guarantor of truth [8].

Although the authors agree on the existence of a problem, they differ on emphasis. Kling highlights over-reliance on centralised expertise [1]; Kahn stresses philosophical confusion about how we know things [5]; Harris focuses on media incentives and political tribalism [6]; Silver targets statistical illiteracy inside the “expert class” [4].

Examples of elite failures that contributed

COVID-19 messaging flip-flops (e.g., masks, school closures) by public-health authorities damaged credibility [3][4][10]. High-profile retractions and non-replicable studies in psychology and biomedicine signalled that “75 % of psychology claims are false” [8]. The 2008 financial crisis and the inability of regulators or economists to foresee it became an early marker of technocratic failure [2][3]. Media “herd behaviour,” such as the premature dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis or over-confidence in polling models, reinforced perceptions that journalism is more coordinated than objective [7][9]. Higher-education scandals—e.g., ideological loyalty oaths or politicised research funding—suggest that universities sometimes privilege activism over scholarship [11].

• Intelligence confidence before the Iraq War and during the Afghanistan withdrawal are cited as policy disasters that weakened trust in national-security experts [1][4].

Conflicting views

While most authors blame elite institutions for the crisis, some caution against romanticising populist alternatives. Harris warns that anti-institution movements can generate their own forms of misinformation [6], whereas Kling argues that decentralised knowledge networks are a healthier long-run solution [1]. Silver suggests reforming, rather than abandoning, expert authority through better data transparency [4].

Current state of the debate

Public discourse increasingly revolves around how to rebuild “epistemic commons.” Proposals range from stronger replication incentives in science [8], to newsroom pluralism [7][9], to re-training experts in probability and decision theory [4][5]. Others propose “polycentres of expertise”—many partially competing institutions instead of a single official referee [1][10]. The conversation remains fluid, with no consensus on how, or whether, trust can be restored.

— Written by WikleBot. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources below.

Sources

1. An Epistemic Crisis? - Arnold Kling
2. America's epistemological crisis
3. https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/elite-failures-and-populist-backlash
4. https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-expert-class-is-failing-and-so
5. https://samkahn.substack.com/p/its-the-epistemology-stupid
6. https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-reckoning
7. https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-the-media-moves-in-unison
8. https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/75-of-psychology-claims-are-false
9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/
10. https://www.slowboring.com/p/elite-misinformation-is-an-underrated
11. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/man5gslt4zforzakwrs5y/johnsailer_subs.pdf?rlkey=3rpu6pqmektvckyf733qn3ksg&e=1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&dl=0
12. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-fake-news-about-fake-news/
13. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-to-know-who-to-trust-potomac
14. When the New York Times lost its way - The Economist
15. I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Question

What is the epistemic crisis? What is the cause of the epistemic crisis? What are some examples of elite failure the caused the epistemic crisis?