The problem is, you can't live like that. Not in an advanced society. There simply is not time and effort enough available for everyone to check everything. You can't do your own medical trials and your own long-term toxicity studies.

>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.

> 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

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.