> Epistemology is probably the only topic that I would recommend being 30+ before you read.

I think you may be on to something, but I would also add that maybe you should consider whether prior to the age of 13 may also be a viable range. I think 13 to it depends is when the problem (roughly, the mind/ego "coming into its own", or something like that) manifests.

Disagree about the age threshold on epistemology. Being introduced to Hume in my teenage years is what got me to repeatedly revisit and reconsider old ideas, and look for new ones in much the way you describe. Human mental life & development isn't so simple as arbitrary age boundaries and specific, fixed learning environments.

Rather than selective pragmatic bias, maybe better is the ability to consider multiple viewpoints with multiple degrees of skepticism and evaluate the strong and weak points, benefits and negative consequences of a thing in tandem.

This is sort of the grander point & motivation behind essays like The Order Of Things -- it's being able to acknowledge how much of what we know & can know is determined for us, and to see the uncertainty of many parts of our existence headon, and see that as something that sets you free and puts the onus on you without defensive denialism or diving straight into flimsy pseudo-certainty.

It's no surprise that when philosophers started publishing books like that, they were accused by more conservative contemporaries of trying to undermine all of civilisation and dive into nihilism. It must have been unnerving to be confronted with the possibility that one's deeply-held convictions might not be eternally robust & not tied to any culture or time period, and seeing the only alternative as nihilistic would come naturally to such people over seeing it as something to celebrate and explore.

We presume that it is us who have digested the thinness of the veil of reality who should be deciding epistemological questions but it is the younger generations who have grown up in this environment of 'Hacking the Matrix' who have the moral right to do it.

> you can't live like that

Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the individual, it undermines all social institutions.

A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.

Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do you really know about the relation between an LED and covert surveillance.

In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259278

>You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.

I can quite easily do a meta study with LLMs and chat with the corpus of works.

In fact I did this just today and came to my doctor, who happens to be a tenured professor at a top 20 world university, with a bunch of tests to hone in on possible customized treatments which we're going to be doing over the next 6 months.

Out of the 30 studies I cited he'd never seen 25 and they were all by people who he knew as experts in his field and was keen to read them after I left. Luckily he had access to all the journals legally unlike the average person.

If one is able to be comfortable with the unknown (a state that can't be escaped except through a simulation), checking everything isn't required.

It's like juggling three balls in a way: if you can't do it, it isn't necessary to believe you can. So too with knowledge, except it's like a thousand times as hard.