What is the epistemic crisis?

What is the “epistemic crisis”? Most of the authors listed use the phrase to describe a breakdown in the public’s capacity to agree on basic facts or to trust the institutions that once certified those facts. They point to a widening gap between “expert” knowledge and public belief, a collapse in confidence in media, academia, and government, and a sense that citizens no longer share a stable reality on which to deliberate policy or politics [2] [4] [5] [7]. Arnold Kling is wary of calling it a full-blown “crisis,” but concedes that we face a growing problem of “intellectual pollution” that makes reliable knowledge harder to identify [1].

What is the cause of the crisis? 1. Accumulated elite mistakes. Repeated, highly visible errors by governments, scientists, journalists and other authorities have damaged credibility [3] [4] [6] [10]. 2. Incentive structures inside knowledge-producing institutions. Career pressure, ideological conformity and media herd behaviour reward attention and consensus more than accuracy [4] [7] [10] [11]. 3. Information-environment change. Social media, niche outlets and algorithmic feeds amplify both expert messaging and its critique, making it harder to distinguish signal from noise [2] [5] [12]. 4. A replication and verification shortfall. In fields like psychology, most published findings do not hold up under scrutiny, undermining faith in “settled science” [8].

Some authors disagree on emphasis: Kling [1] and the Boston Review essay [12] see talk of a crisis as overstated or as a moral panic about “misinformation,” whereas Silver [4] and Kahn [5] argue that institutional rot is deep enough to justify the word.

Examples of elite failure that fuelled the crisis • 2003 Iraq-WMD intelligence fiasco (used by several writers as an early benchmark of expert error) [6]. • The 2008–09 financial crisis, when regulators and economists failed to foresee systemic risk [3] [4]. • COVID-19 communication reversals—e.g., early mask guidance, school-closure debates, and the lab-leak fight—showing scientific advice being issued with more certainty than evidence warranted [4] [6] [10]. • The “replication crisis” in psychology and other social sciences, with roughly three-quarters of tested findings failing to reproduce [8]. • Media “herd” errors such as uniform polling narratives in 2016 and 2020, and the quick suppression of the Hunter-Biden-laptop story, later partly reversed, illustrating how newsroom conformity can misinform the public [7] [9] [10]. • Higher-education governance controversies—DEI bureaucracies, speech codes, retracted papers—seen by some writers as evidence that universities privilege ideology over truth-seeking [11].

Public discourse Across Substack, mainstream newspapers, and podcasts, two broad camps have emerged. One camp (Silver, Harris, Yglesias, Kahn) stresses structural problems inside elite institutions and urges major reforms before trust can be rebuilt [4] [5] [6] [10]. A second camp (Kling, Boston Review, parts of mainstream media) argues that the notion of a singular “crisis” can itself be exploited to delegitimise expertise and that pluralistic disagreement is normal in a free society [1] [12]. Despite differences, both sides concede that the health of our epistemic institutions now figures centrally in debates over democracy, populism and policy.

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

Sources

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?