Epistemology. Epistemology is a sub-genre of philosophy that concerns itself with questions about knowledge - that is how we come to know things. As a former philosophy major, this was easily one of my least favorite disciplines - sure it gave us the Scientific Method, but existentialism was just way more sexy to me.
Last year though, I read Gloria Origgi’s “Reputation: What it is and why it Matters” which announced the death of the Information Age with that of the age of reputation. Sure science gives us the tools to come to know new things, but most of us don’t spend our days doing controlled experiments to test our hypotheses - rather we rely on trusted sources to do that vetting for us. Unfortunately that means we are now at a place where information has been politicized, we have our own trusted sources (that reinforce our beliefs) and distrusted sources which our sources discredit.
So here we are, fundamentally divided, exasperated that the other side can’t see the truths which to us are self-evident. We don’t trust the other’s sources to be telling the truth. Ultimately we’ll fall back on that scientific method, but that doesn’t yield immediate results we can act on right away, it’s slow and deliberate by design because it’s objective is to bring us closer to truth - not necessarily what we should do right now. And while it gives us a way to predict the future, it advances when it’s predictions fail. It gives us better hindsight than foresight. In the end we’ll learn which of us was closer to the truth, but it may not matter then.
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