The rising prevalence of epistemic mismatch

From Villainous Monologues: They May Be More Common than You Think by Caroline Furlong.  

She references a tweet from Nate Silver.  

So for the final chapter in my book I've been reading a lot about technological progress and the future of humanity. And I came across Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb". And holy shit, how profoundly evil is it to think that The Problem is that too many humans exist. pic.twitter.com/CoThSZXKEE

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) January 19, 2024

Furlong comments.

That is the first page of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. Yes, THAT Paul Ehrlich. Mr. Silver is a bit late to the party on recognizing that Ehrlich’s overpopulation theory means he literally wants lots of people who are alive now, in this present moment and all across the world, dead to satisfy him and his beliefs. I have known people who have been explaining for years that this was Mr. Ehrlich’s end goal. 

She then goes on to lambast Silver for not having been more aware earlier of Ehrlich's very clear and explicit banal evil.  For Ehrlich, the problem was too many people and the solution was to have many fewer people.  That's a solution brimming with authoritarian coercion and simmering just below an explicit call for mass murder.  

I do not dispute that Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was a pretty clear call for culling the human herd.  I think a lot of people in love with the environment got distracted by that love and overlooked the very obvious implications of what Ehrlich wanted to happen.

But I think Furlong is inadvertently touching on something else.  Epistemic mismatches.

I encounter this all the time on my own.  I rock along with what I think is a reasonable inventory of my surfeits and deficits of knowledge.  I know a lot about history.  I know relatively little about music.  Surfeits and deficits that are the product of my interests and the path dependency of circumstances.

And then I smack into the missing step at the bottom of the epistemic chairs.  I come across something I should know about, something I am interested in knowing about and yet I suddenly realize I don't know about it at all.  Nothing.  I don't know the texts.  I don't know the experts.  I don't know the parameters of the topic.

I discover there is a whole literature on the topic.  It is all disorienting and humbling.  And delighting of course.  New knowledge to be discovered, all there and ready on a silver plate.  I just hadn't realized that the silver plate existed.

And I see this epistemic mismatch among others as well.  People who are comparably bright, comparably experienced and capable.  People who can converse at a high and abstract level but who struggle when they get to specifics because they don't share the same knowledge base.  

As an example - a pair of individuals who fall to talking at some event and it obliquely emerges that they share a respect for the accomplishments of the Roman Empire.  But as they talk further, it becomes apparent that while they share an admiration, one only has a hazy awareness of the broad accomplishments whereas the other has detailed knowledge and distinguishes between the Empire of the Republic, the Monarchical Empire, and the Byzantine Empire.  

They have stumbled across an epistemic mismatch.  One has discovered a knowledge absence in the other which they did not anticipate.  It is a glitch in the theory of mind.

And I think we will encounter more and more epistemic mismatches over time.  We are producing torrents of knowledge at an accelerating pace.  Our prosperity allows an increasing atomization and specialization of individual life experience and education.  

It would be an interesting exercise to gather 100 accomplished bright people and get them to identify the 100 most important and influential texts in their lives.  Other than the Bible and a few other landmark texts, just how much overlap would their be?  Especially if we are rigorous and kept to books they had really engaged with (as opposed to simply being aware of by reputation.)  

I would wager that if I were to gather 100 peers, not more than 5% would identify The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich as important.   I would be pretty comfortable believing that maybe only 1%.  Or 0%.  I might believe that none of them would be able to match author name with title if prompted by one or the other.

So is it surprising the Nate Silver (extremely bright and knowledgeable) would not have known about Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb?  Or the evil implications of Ehrlich's objectives?  

I don't think so.  A lot of people have pretty large epistemic gaps.  More critically, as the volume of knowledge increases and as we all become more specialized in our interests and atomized in our experiences, my suspicion is that the challenge of epistemic mismatch will become greater and greater.

Whether it is a problem or not, I am uncertain.  But I am reasonably confident that it is an issue with which we are culturally inexperienced and unaccustomed to.