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This is a blog about objective knowledge and individual beliefs. How can we apply insights from cognitive science and social epistemology to everyday opinion-forming?

Every society must have some prevailing standard for distinguishing between reality and illusion. What is the right yardstick for distinguishing the few true beliefs from the many false ones? And who should set that standard? How does this criterion get formed, and how do we, in turn, rely on it when forming personal beliefs? What happens when the standard is hacked or misfires and a piece of fact blessed with the stamp of common sense turns out to be a myth? How can we tell when this has happened? When should we trust a contrarian expert instead of social consensus, and how do we know which one? Plus, if you go that route, how do you answer the voices that call you a potential crackpot?

If you subscribe, you’ll get my latest articles. But there’s more. In the newsletter, I also share articles, videos, discussions, pieces of research, or other interesting finds from around the Internet, spanning as broad of topics as the rest of this site. In a given edition, you might find a LessWrong article on how to form opinions, an examination of how the mainstream picks the winning theory, examples of social consenses that were wrong and how we got there, philosophical reflections on the nature of beliefs and epistemology, thoughts on the constitution of knowledge, analyses of concrete arguments actually going around today, and much more.

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