Talk: The case for epistemic discipline

I gave a talk at EAGx Nordics about epistemic discipline, building on my argument-checking of opinion pieces and live debates. The video is now up:

Many participants in public discourse don’t even try to give proper arguments. For instance, this happens a lot in the debate about AI risk:

How should you engage with these kinds of claims? I discuss three methods:

• Charity: rephrasing them to make them more reasonable

• Sarcasm: dismissing them with mockery

• Epistemic discipline: calmly explaining what’s wrong with them

Charity allows people who discuss in bad faith to get away with it, and sarcasm risks derailing the debate. By contrast, epistemic discipline makes it clear that you expect people to give proper arguments, and that your interlocutor isn’t doing that.

Critical thinking books often focus on how to spot subtle fallacies, but before we get to that stage, we need to make sure we’re playing a game of arguments, where fallacies actually count. In my experience, epistemic discipline helps to achieve that. Taking nonsense literally exposes it for what it is and pushes for a norm of rational discourse.