Adaptation to Reality

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Depending on who you talk to, knowledge is either a) more advanced than ever or b) having a pretty bad century so far.

In some ways, knowledge is disseminated more widely than at any other moment in history. Discoveries in science and technology are driving enormous change. And everything humans have ever discovered is at your fingertips online. But, as we all know, fakery abounds. AI means you can’t trust that any particular idea or claim has a real source in an actual human. And radical inequality, among other things, has sown distrust in expert knowledge—or knowledge of any kind, really.

In this episode, we turn to the philosopher Jennifer Nagel, author of Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (among many other things), for help thinking about the complexity of how knowledge and trust work in our classrooms and in the world. And we speak with the artist Alfred Dudley III about why it can be so hard to find common epistemic ground in educational institutions.