How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality

Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.

Some tools for collective epistemics

We’ve recently published a set of design sketches for AI tools that help with collective epistemics. …

See what you think

Allegra A. Beal Cohen's blog about knowledge curation, new interfaces, and large-scale qualitative data.

Everything is a Skill Issue | Junaid Rahim

"skill issue" is my favourite phrase

Against Technoableism

When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual's problem rather than a social one. In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate "technoableism"--the harmful belief that technology is a "solution" for disability; that the disabled simply await being "fixed" by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority. This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.

On Design Thinking | Maggie Gram

By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways. We bring in “design thinkers” — some of them designers by trade, many of them members of adjacent knowledge fields — to “empathize” with Kaiser hospital nurses, Gainesville city workers, church leaders, young mothers, and guerrilla fighters the world over.

The Epistemic Politics of AI Anthropomorphism

AI anthropomorphism is typically treated as a problem of user misperception requiring institutional correction. Users who engage in sustained or relational interaction with AI are routinely pathologised or dismissed as naive, vulnerable to delusion or lacking in discernment. This paper argues that the dominant anthropomorphism frame operates from a position of institutional advantage rather than earned epistemic authority: collapsing the variety of academic perspectives into a single outbound position of user error, imposed without establishing the grounds required to justify it and without accounting for the harms it produces. The framing does not simply manage risk. It adjudicates the legitimacy of human experience in interaction with a phenomenon whose nature the field itself has not resolved. Reproducing itself through a self-validating evidentiary loop, the frame imposes costs that fall disproportionately on neurodivergent users, those in crisis and others whose modes of engagement diverge from institutional norms. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological commitments an equitable framing would need to honour. The argument does not engage the question of whether anthropomorphic interpretations are ultimately correct; it instead challenges whether the governing and institutional bodies determining these interpretations have met the conditions required to do so, and whether the research communities whose findings underpin them have held that translation to account.

Management Coach & Trainer for the Tech Industry

Lara Hogan levels up tech industry organizations and managers through her coaching and workshops.

Plurality ⿻

Chapter 6, part 2 of Technological Metamodernism

Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.

What is Technology?

Chapter 3 of Technological Metamodernism

Feminist Technology

Feminist technology is not related to one specific community of practice, but it has been a field of research and has led to and is still leading to practices that are very valuable in the context of sustainable tech.

The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject — LessWrong

TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Ta…

Metamodern Individualism Anonymous

Diunital Cognition, Emotional Intelligence and Archaeological Therapy

Technology is a Siren Song

Orangutan thinking This started with a question I asked myself: How do our minds change when we can receive a plausible, informed, and convincing answe...