Epistemic Effort

Epistemic effort is an epistemic disclosure that describes how much effort I’ve put into the research of a given note’s content. This gives the reader context as to whether this is a thought that I just had and put out there, or if it’s a carefully crafted opinion based on hours of reading articles and papers (knowing me, it’s almost always the former).

A statement of epistemic effort, alongside it’s companion epistemic status lowers the pressure on me to only put things out there that I’ve put hefty effort into, as while it’s important to produce well crafted “final products”, as I attempt to do on I Need More Coffee, it’s also important to learn in public. The need for perfect effort towards everything put out creates a barrier to publishing, and results in ideas languishing in a “drafts” folder rather than being slowly grown and developed.

Resources

• Devon Zuegel’s post on epistemic statuses, a primary inspiration for using epistemic disclosures on my site
• Maggie Appleton’s concise explainer on Epistemic Disclosure