Notes on Epistemic Collapse

For a long time I’ve been having difficulty making sense for myself of a lot of what is going on in the world around me. Recently I’ve found that a useful way of understanding some otherwise baffling things is as products of what is sometimes called “epistemic collapse”. By “epistemic collapse” I mean the collapse of a shared reality, caused by the loss of reliable sources for distinguishing what is true from what is false.

Someone I’ve found to have a very insightful take on this is Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins. Some of his best explanations of the problem are at threads on his Bluesky feed, for example here and this recent one, which includes:

The danger isn’t just that people believe lies. It’s that entire communities become locked into belief systems that can’t be challenged, where loyalty replaces evidence, and disagreement feels like betrayal. That doesn’t just distort truth, it breaks trust.

When this happens at scale, it’s not just bad information, it’s a breakdown in how society makes decisions. We lose the ability to deliberate, to find common ground, to hold anyone accountable. That’s what disordered discourse really is, a collapse in collective reasoning.

And when debate collapses, power doesn’t disappear, it just becomes unaccountable. Truth becomes tribal. Institutions become hollow. People are left shouting across a void, each group certain the others are insane or evil…

So the real question isn’t “who decides what’s true.” The question is, do we still have the ability to decide anything together at all? Because once we lose that, democracy isn’t under threat. It’s already gone.

I find thinking in these terms helps to make sense of the bizarre and disturbing new political situation in the US and elsewhere, with a new form of Fascism on the march. Autocrats are coming to power on a wave of lies and the destruction of institutions that can provide the facts needed for a shared reality. Efforts to fight this by just coming up with better policy proposals are doomed, what is needed is some way to bring back reality to our information environment. Absent this, we’re looking at a future dominated by autocrats governing through lies and a system of client oligarchs who work with them. The US is now well on its way there.

I don’t have any idea of how to deal with the epistemic collapse problem, other than a hope that if it becomes more widely recognized, people will somehow start finding answers. Thinking in these terms has made me realize that a lot of what I’ve been doing on this blog has been motivated by wanting to provide a source of reality-based information about topics that I have first-hand knowledge of but where at the same time I see the mainstream information environment as dominated by lies.

The situation in fundamental physics

The motivation for starting this blog was the situation in fundamental physical theory over twenty years ago. At the time, popular discussion of the subject was dominated by untruths about string theory, with for instance endless press articles claiming “physicists have finally found a way to test string theory!”. There’s a lot less of this now, and I hope some of that is due to the influence of this blog and the book that I wrote. Within physics departments, string theory was pursued in a very tribal manner, with the main conflict pitting the string theory tribe against the phenomenology and loop quantum gravity tribes.

Nowadays the situation is somewhat different, with the string theory tribe still dominant in formal theory, but mostly no longer doing string theory. The failed string theory ideology is now in the background, but publicly acknowledging its failure will still get you in big trouble with the tribe. Students are still being trained in the ideology (this fall here at Columbia the physics department is again offering an undergraduate course in string theory), but the mainstream research agenda is now elsewhere.

The problem of epistemic collapse in particle theory now goes way, way back. What kept the subject tightly tethered to reality was experiment, but from the 1980s on the main open questions lost useful experimental input. From then until now, the subject has been dominated by an evolving set of “hot topics”, Lacking any shared agreement about whether they were connecting in any useful way to reality, these were often driven more by tribal considerations than anything else. The tribal structure is now complicated, but well-understood to those working in the subject. One very over-simplified way to understand it is as subtribes governed by an oligarchy dominated by figures at Harvard and the IAS. These days if you want a career in the subject, you need to join a tribe, with your choice the Swampland (Vafa), celestial holography (Strominger), amplitudes (Arkani-Hamed), generalized symmetries (Seiberg) or black holes/information (Maldacena/Witten).

Yes, this is a caricature. Also worth noting is that the whole subject is facing a different sort of collapse, as physics departments and US federal funding agencies stop funding theoretical particle physics at all. The latest hep-th US faculty hiring rumor mill has only 8 people getting tenure track jobs this year, about half from the formal theory subtribes.

The situation at Columbia

I started writing about what is happening here at Columbia very specifically to counter lies being widely spread about the subject, which I often know to be lies based on first-hand information. That there is a serious antisemitism problem at Columbia is a lie, heavily promoted by those upset by criticism of the ongoing genocidal and ethnic cleansing policies of the Israeli government. About the truth of what is happening here and now locally, I’m mainly relying on my own eyes and conversations with others who are also here and have first-hand information. What’s going on is very much tribal warfare with on the ground massive killings of civilians happening in Gaza and here a campaign to deny this and paint anti-genocide protest as antisemitic terrorism.

About what’s happening in Gaza I don’t have first-hand information. There I have to rely on a long lifetime of reading various news sources and getting some idea of their reliability. If you don’t believe genocide and ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza, you need to explain why this story from today’s Haaretz headlined

‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid

is not true. I don’t see how “genocide” is not the right word for starving 2 million people and firing on them when they try and get food. As for “ethnic cleansing”, Israeli policy in Gaza appears to be to destroy all structures there, shooting civilians who get too close to the operation

“Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish,” said a veteran fighter. “They’re making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don’t demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front.”

As a result, the fighter added, the contractors’ demolition campaign brings them, along with their relatively small security details, close to distribution points or along the routes used by aid trucks.

In order [for the contractors] to protect themselves, a shooting incident breaks out, and people are killed,” he said. “These are areas where Palestinians are allowed to be – we’re the ones who moved closer and decided [they] endangered us. So, for a contractor to make another 5,000 shekels and take down a house, it’s deemed acceptable to kill people who are only looking for food.”

What next?

My problem these days is that I’d really like to be spending my time on something very different, continuing to make slow progress on some ideas I find very promising, and getting the results written up. About the situation in fundamental physical theory, for a while I’ve been writing less and less. It’s a depressing topic, nothing is happening, epistemic collapse has led to intellectual collapse, and I’ve long ago said whatever I have to say about it.

About the situation at Columbia, it is changing and evolving. The bogus “antisemitism” campaign continues in force and I still believe it’s worth the time to try and challenge it with accurate information about what is really happening here, so I’ll keep blogging about it to some extent.

I have very limited time to moderate discussion in the comment section, so in particular no time to deal with those who want to conduct tribal warfare here. While I hope the notes on “epistemic collapse” are helpful to others, unfortunately I also don’t have the time to moderate a general discussion of that topic, outside it’s specific application to the subjects I’m trying to write about on the blog.

Update: Some thoughts caused by reading the latest from Stand Columbia explaining why Columbia must immediately make a deal with Trump.

Another aspect of epistemic collapse is collapse of the legal system, which depends on being able to distinguish truth from falsehood, and whether a law is being followed or not. The legal system can collapse if judges start accepting falsehoods as truth, or if the executive finds it can just ignore what a judge says about what is true and what is false. It can also collapse because people and institutions give up on it, decide it cannot provide any recourse against dictatorial power.

The trustees describe what they are doing as negotiating a “settlement”. I’ve been thinking of my disagreement with the decision of the trustees to not go to court, to not challenge the obvious illegality of what Trump is doing, as a disagreement about values and morality. But it actually is much more practical than that, and I suspect the trustees either have or will find this out.

Harvard has challenged the Trump illegalities in court through lawsuits. Like most lawsuits, they may some day decide to settle them out of court. If so, this will be a conventional “settlement” of differences within the legal system. What Columbia is doing though is very different. It is starting by accepting illegalities as valid governmental actions. They’ve abandoned the legal system, deciding that they’re better off outside of it, that we’re now in a dictatorship where legality is irrelevant. All that matters is the will of the dictator. If Columbia “settles” with Trump, it will be nothing more than a statement that “we give in to the dictator’s will by doing X”. Any thing they think they’re getting in return for this will have no legal basis, it’s just the current will of the dictator, which may change.

We’ll see how this works out, but my impression is that the Trump people understand this very well. They want the Columbia trustees to publicly humiliate themselves and the institution, by bowing down to dictatorial will and publicly supporting a new regime which operates outside the law. They have an agenda of defunding research universities and will pursue that separately. So, in opposition to Stand Columbia, I’d argue that, even if the trustees don’t believe anymore in the court system, they should not “settle”. Signing another “we give in to the dictator’s will” document will get them nothing but more humiliation.

Update: More lies about “antisemitism” from Trump. The idea that Harvard is currently “in violent violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin” is an absurdity. The threat to take away all federal funding if Harvard doesn’t do something about this is ridiculous. All federal funding already has been taken away, and since the accusations are lies, there’s nothing Harvard can do to answer them. These lies are a tactic to force Harvard to agree to the dictator’s will in the way Columbia did in the past, but we don’t know what actions the dictator is explicitly trying to force on Harvard or Columbia.

I hope Harvard will continue its policy of fighting this kind of thing in court.