Context: This is a very brief and early take about the breath of topics that can be covered within Epistemics. I think that "Epistemics" might become a more formalized field in the future, and am worried that it will be carved out in a mistaken way. Also, I'm generally trying to grapple with how we might want this field to be formalized.
Audience: People working closely around Epistemics

When working on [improving epistemics], I think it's important not to restrict yourself to a narrow domain like [human biases], [judgemental forecasting], or [misinformation].

I don't think there are many analyses so far that really try to improve human judgement over a large number of inputs. So I suspect that we really have little idea now about which inputs to be most focusing on.

Epistemics is a topic that seems really esoteric at some points, and absolutely everywhere in others.

Some example areas that could be useful include:

1. Forecasting
2. Data collection
3. Traditional education
4. Teaching (certain parts of) philosophy
5. Therapy
6. Finding ways to dampen oversized egos
7. Fighting against powerful forces that cause "epistemic harm", like certain political, corporate, and religious groups.
8. Traditional journalism
9. AIs that are very good at sharing the right information with the right people
10. Basic productivity (including things like sleep and happiness)

While there are a lot of inputs to epistemics, there are also clearly a lot of outputs. I roughly would expect that improvements in epistemics would quickly lead to improvements in decision-making, which impact just about everything.

As a larger sample, I asked Claude to take these ideas and make a longer table of interventions (focused on organizations), ranked on both importance and “Is it epistemics?” I then made some minor and quick adjustments.

I'm not thrilled with this specific list, but I think it gets at the sort of breadth and analysis I'd find useful.

If I were helping a team of researchers be more effective, I’d want to offer them everything that would help them be so, “epistemics” or not.

Arguably, the reason for some more specific field to exist would be if there were certain subsets of interests that feature large overlaps in expertise. There are definitely some potential clusters here. But the field is still early.

What I don’t want to see happen is for people to cut off certain subsections, then unnecessarily cut off some high-importance intervention types. This field is confusing, so that seems like it would be easy to do.