Living in Entropy: Epistemic Entropy, When Truth Stops Feeling Solid (E3 of 5 in Series)
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. If you're new here, this is the show where I help you understand your world by helping you see how psychology, media, culture, and technology shape the way you think, feel, work, and live. Today, we're in the middle of a five episode series focused on the entropy age we're all living through. In the first episode, we stayed close to your inner life and talked about emotional entropy, existential anxiety, ontological insecurity, and anticipatory grief.
Leslie Poston:In the second episode, we widened the focus and talked about system decay, collective stress, and what happens when institutions feel hollow or unsafe. Today, we're going a little deeper into how your sense of reality and what is true or false gets shaped by information systems and media. You may have noticed that it feels harder to know what's going on or who to trust. You scroll through a feed and see confident statements that contradict each other. Read headlines that feel designed to provoke, not inform.
Leslie Poston:Friends and family seem to live in different fact universes even though you share a language and sometimes a household. After a while, it's not just that the content is confusing. Reality itself starts to feel a bit unstable. In this episode, I wanna talk about epistemic entropy. Epistemic entropy is my way of putting a name to the scatter and instability that shows up when the systems you use to make sense of events are noisy, biased, or bent toward profit and power and not clarity.
Leslie Poston:We'll look at how your brain tries to build a coherent picture from messy inputs, how unequal access to credibility shapes who gets believed, and how digital platforms act like extensions of your mind for better or for worse. The goal is not to tell you which sources are good and which are bad, but to help you understand what your mind is up against when the truth stops feeling solid. Let's start with what your brain is trying to do all day long. Many cognitive scientists describe the brain as a prediction machine. Instead of passively recording facts, it constantly generates guesses about what will happen next and updates those guesses with new information.
Leslie Poston:We talked about this in-depth on a recent episode about how everyone has a different reality. This idea shows up in work by researchers like Carl Friston and others who study predictive processing. In everyday life, this means your brain is always asking questions like, what usually happens here? What should I expect from this person? What kind of day is this going to be based on this information?
Leslie Poston:It uses patterns you've already learned to reduce surprise and keep you oriented in your day, space, and time. Under conditions of epistemic entropy, these patterns become harder to rely on. Your feeds mix news, jokes, sponsored content, propaganda, and personal updates in one continuous scroll. Algorithms are tuned to maximize engagement, not accuracy. So the material that rises to the top is often what's most emotional, polarizing, or sticky rather than what's calm, nuanced, or well supported.
Leslie Poston:Your predictive brain is trying to form a stable picture from inputs that aren't stable. One day a topic is presented as an urgent crisis, and the next day it's barely mentioned. One outlet frames an event as proof of progress while another frames the same event as evidence of collapse. Friends share interpretations of these events that are shaped by their own histories, biases, and needs. Over time, this can produce two kinds of strain.
Leslie Poston:One is overload. You simply don't have the cognitive bandwidth to evaluate every single claim, trace every source, or double check every statistic. And the way AI is encroaching on our everyday information stream is not helping this at all. The other is what we might call pattern anxiety. Your brain keeps reaching for a stable story that fits the signals you see, but the signals are inconsistent and often manipulated.
Leslie Poston:People respond in different ways to this stress. Some of us clamp down on a single narrative and refuse to engage with anything that threatens it. Others of us float between narratives and start to treat all claims as equally shaky. A few of us step back from the news and information altogether and say, I just can't deal with this anymore. None of these are signs that people are lazy or uncurious.
Leslie Poston:They're mostly signs that predictive brains are trying to cope with chaotic feeds. There's another layer to epistemic entropy that has less to do with information volume and more to do with power. Philosopher Miranda Fricker uses the term epistemic injustice to describe the ways that some people are unfairly disadvantaged as knowers. One form is testimonial injustice where a person's word is given less weight because of assumptions made about their identity. Another is hermeneutical injustice where people lack shared concepts and language to describe their experiences, which makes it hard for those experiences to be recognized and believed.
Leslie Poston:You can see this in how different voices are treated in public debates. When a worker, a patient, or a marginalized person describes harm, their account may be dismissed as emotional, biased, or anecdotal. When a person from a more privileged group says the exact same thing, it may be treated as groundbreaking. When a community raises early warnings about environmental or social risks, like you're hearing from Memphis right now about AI data centers, those warnings may be ignored until a crisis becomes impossible to deny. In a media environment, epistemic injustice shapes whose stories get amplified, whose analysis is treated as expert, and whose perspective is treated as optional.
Leslie Poston:This doesn't just affect individuals. It affects the collective map of reality. If certain groups are persistently disbelieved or ignored, the shared picture of what is happening will be distorted in predictable directions. Hermeneutical injustice adds another twist. If there's no widely understood term for what you're going through, it's harder to explain it to others and sometimes even to yourself.
Leslie Poston:Before people had a phrase like sexual harassment, for example, many experiences were scattered and misnamed. The same is true today for forms of harm created by platform design, algorithmic bias, or slow motion policy changes. People can feel something is wrong, but available language doesn't quite fit, so the experience remains private and easier to discount. When you place epistemic injustice inside late stage capitalism and system decay, you get a very specific flavor of epistemic entropy. It's not just that the information is messy.
Leslie Poston:It's that the messiness is structured. Certain interests have more access to megaphones. Certain identities are coded as credible by default. Certain harms fall through gaps in our shared language. For listeners, understanding this can reduce self blame.
Leslie Poston:If you struggle to feel confident about what you know, you're not just dealing with personal uncertainty. You're navigating a knowledge landscape that's been shaped shaped by power. For you, understanding this can reduce any self blame you may feel. If you struggle to feel confident about what you know, you're not dealing with personal uncertainty alone. You're navigating a knowledge landscape that's been shaped by power.
Leslie Poston:Another idea that helps make sense of epistemic entropy comes from Clark and Chalmers who wrote about the extended mind. The basic claim is that thinking does not only happen inside your skull. It also happens through tools, devices, notes, and other people that you use as part of your cognitive process. Think about how you use your phone. You outsource memory to a calendar, contacts, saved links, photos.
Leslie Poston:You outsource navigation to maps. You're outsourcing some judgment about what matters to the app algorithms and feeds you open each day. You even outsource the emotional labor of friendship to apps like Facebook, which we talked about in another episode. Over time, these tools become part of how you think and decide, not just things you use occasionally. In theory, this could be supportive.
Leslie Poston:Carefully designed tools can help you store information, see patterns, and coordinate with other people. Under late stage capitalism, however, many of the tools you rely on are built by companies whose business models depend on capturing and selling your attention. That means the extended parts of your mind are not neutral. They are shaped by advertising, engagement metrics, and design choices aimed at keeping you scrolling. Notifications interrupt your concentration, recommendations lean toward content that provokes reaction, and interfaces are updated based on what keeps users hooked, not what supports clear thinking.
Leslie Poston:From a psychological point of view, this is like having a noisy collaborator inside your thought process. You sit down to check one fact and find yourself twenty minutes later watching a chain of suggested clips. You open a messaging app to connect with a friend and are pulled into a trending topic that raises your stress level. The tools that could help you manage epistemic entropy instead contribute to it. This doesn't mean you need to discard every device or account.
Leslie Poston:It does mean that part of your thinking now happens in spaces that are not aligned with your well-being. Recognizing that can help you treat some of your confusion or distraction as an understandable effect of design, not as a personal failing. So what do you do with all of this? I'm not going to offer a checklist that magically restores certainty. Epistemic entropy is tied to deep structural issues at media, economics, and politics.
Leslie Poston:No individual habit can cancel that out. But there are ways to relate to this environment that protect a little bit more of your clarity and agency. One is to adjust your standards for what counts as enough knowledge for daily decisions. You simply can't research every topic at the level of a specialist and you're competing with inaccurate AI summaries almost everywhere you look right now. You can decide which domains matter most for your life and values, which sources offer you the most unvarnished truth not contaminated with technology, and invest more care there while allowing yourself to be less certain in areas that are less central.
Leslie Poston:Another is to pay attention not only to what information you take in, but how that information makes you feel and act. Another is to pay attention not only to what information you take in, but how that information makes you feel and act. If a source leaves you consistently panicked, numb, or hostile with very little sense of next steps, that's an indicator that the source may not be trustworthy. If another source leaves you more oriented and able to think, that source may be more trustworthy, but you still need to check the veracity of what that source is telling you. Some of these difficult topics can be tricky to understand.
Leslie Poston:You can also build small shared practices with others. This might be a group chat where you trade vetted sources instead of hot takes, or a regular conversation where you compare what you've heard and notice gaps when you talk about it with your friends and trusted family. These don't have to be formal media literacy workshops or anything like that. There's simply a way to not carry the epistemic entropy alone and not rely only on your brain to seek the truth. And finally, it can help to name the conditions out loud.
Leslie Poston:When you catch yourself thinking, I should know exactly what's true about this by now, it might be more accurate to say, I'm trying to form a stable picture from fragmented, biased, and manipulated information streams. That sentence is less catchy, but it's more honest about the situation. And remember, the goal is not to become perfectly informed. The goal is to stay human and thoughtful in an environment that often treats our attention as a resource to extract. In this third part of the Entropy series, I focused on epistemic entropy, what happens to your sense of reality when predictive brains meet chaotic feeds, when epistemic injustice shapes who gets believed, and when your devices act like extensions of your mind that are tuned more for engagement than for clarity.
Leslie Poston:If any of this matched your experience of trying to stay informed, I hope it helps you see your confusion, frustration, or fatigue as a reasonable reaction to the information system failures around you and not as proof that you are failing at being an informed person. And if this episode helped, share it with someone who may have told you, I feel like I can't tell what's even real anymore. They might appreciate having some language for that experience. The show notes will include research and resources if you want to read more about the ideas we touched on today. And next time we're going to look at power and entropy.
Leslie Poston:We'll talk about billionaires, tech leaders, and authoritarian movements, the people and structures that benefit from chaos, and what psychology can tell us about why some people become comfortable or even enthusiastic about thriving in conditions that are exhausting for everyone else. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember, stay curious and tune in tomorrow for the next episode in the series on entropy.
Creators and Guests
