Fundamental Uncertainty, First Edition
The first edition of my book, Fundamental Uncertainty, is out! You can read it online now, with print, ebook, and audiobook versions to follow.
I know some of you read the draft version I posted on LessWrong as I wrote it. If you did, thank you, because your comments and feedback were critical in making the final version what it is (some of you even made it into the acknowledgments!). There are lots of changes since the draft, so if you read it before and thought “ehh, maybe there’s something here, but I don’t buy it”, I highly recommend reading it again.
If you’re not familiar with the book, here’s its thesis:
Our knowledge of the truth is fundamentally uncertain because of epistemic circularity caused by the Problem of the Criterion.
We manage fundamental uncertainty by making pragmatic assumptions that lead us to believe in the truth of claims that help us achieve our goals.
Consequently, the truth that can be known is not independent of us, but rather dependent on that for which we care.
That truth is fundamentally uncertain and grounded in care has far-reaching implications for many of the world’s hardest-to-solve problems.
The book argues for and develops these points in greater detail. It’s written for a general STEM audience, but I think it will be mostly of interest to rationalist and rationalist-adjacent readers. I especially hope folks working on AI and AI safety read the book, since I wrote it to document all the things I had to learn about epistemology to pursue my own previous AI safety research program.
I’ll have more book-related news in the next few weeks, as I’m planning an essay contest, and I’m actively working on getting the print and ebook versions together, with an audiobook to follow. For now, you can read it either in your browser or as markdown, and if you’d like other formats, please let me know in the comments.