Our native epistemic inclination is to be credulous and lazy. As a defence against these vices, many educated people have adopted an epistemic ideology saying you should be sceptical and diligent.
This mindset no doubt does a lot of good. But it has some neglected downsides, as people push for scepticism and diligence excessively and indiscriminately.
If you’re extremely sceptical, you’ll never be wrong. But that comes at a high price. To make sure you’re never wrong, you’ll have to use extreme epistemic safety margins. As a result, you’ll fail to believe many important truths. And you’ll reject many forms of evidence that could have been illuminating, because they’re not up to your error-free standards.
Just like you’re spending too much time in airports if you never miss a flight, you’re missing out on too many truths if you never believe in a falsehood.
Yes, many are too credulous and overconfident. But some overreact, neurotically refusing to believe in anything that isn’t backed by the most unambiguous evidence. It’s arguably a crude attempt to signal epistemic virtue.
Similarly, some overreact to our epistemic laziness, and push for diligence in an indiscriminate and unhelpful way. You often hear people complain that others have too short attention spans, don’t want to read long books on obscure topics, and so on. Some of these complaints are right, but many of them miss the fact that it can often be entirely rational to refuse to read more than abstracts and short introductions on certain topics. There is so much to read, and so little time. And too many articles and books are padded with chaff between scarce insights. So it often makes sense to go for short distillations.
In this case, too, there is a bit of a neurotic attitude, and crude signalling of epistemic virtue. Yes, epistemic laziness is bad, and refusing to read a long book is something that an epistemically lazy person would do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re epistemically lazy if you do the same.
Some of us should have a more relaxed attitude towards our native epistemic shortcomings. Credulity and laziness aren’t good tendencies, but we should be careful to make sure our attempts to overcome them don’t cause other forms of harm.
