Watching casuals practice "epistemology" (as they perceive it) is a lot like the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect, or watching congresspeople discussing TikTok: in over

Watching casuals practice "epistemology" (as they perceive it) is a lot like the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect, or watching congresspeople discussing TikTok: in over their heads, and not aware of it (in large part because we live in a culture where what is "true" is by consensus/memorization, and any suggestion of serious epistemic practice is (often emotionally and insistently) dismissed because that "is" "pedantic" or "is" a "conspiracy theory"...both socially conditioned behaviors, in fact (as a boolean)). Easy way to trigger the phenomenon: introduce the notion of complex causality (as opposed to justification) into a Ukraine war discussion, and observe with fascination the highly probabilistic responses from humans (perform 100 experiments, aggregate the ensuing responses, and you will have a normal distribution, gee, a lot like how ChatGPT works). I have LOTS of practice doing this (on a variety of topics, religion is another easy one) on platforms where longer and finer grained arguments are socially acceptable (they tend not to be on more intellectual sites like HN). This very thread has numerous artifacts of various associated phenomena, but it's all normal so goes unnoticed.