What is the 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.

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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?