Interesting. I've used the term "epistemic hygiene" plenty of times, but it looks like I've been using it incorrectly. I thought an "epistemic hygiene technique" was simply a strategy for avoiding getting epistemically messed up in some way, but it seems like what it really deals with is sound belief propagation throughout a community.
As for the question of what epistemic hygiene norms there should be though, I wonder whether there's anything more to what those norms should be past what I used to think the term meant. In other words, does being epistemically sanitary with what you write involve anything past simply remaining epistemically rational with what you're communicating?
It seems like an interesting question--how to keep the community memeplex sanitary, and avoid spilling harmful memes or letting destructive beliefs propagate--but I'm not sure there's anything more to this than what we already seem to spend most our time talking about: how to maintain your own epistemic rationality, and how to communicate efficiently and effectively by properly managing the inferential distance etc.
It certainly seems like it may be a fruitful line of inquiry, and I'll think more about it later, but for now I'm just trying to bring up the possibility that this question is of no special importance, and there's nothing to community epistemic practice besides basic individual epistemic practice coupled with the ability to communicate effectively.
The wiki entry for Epistemic Hygiene defines the term as:
Epistemic hygiene consists of practices meant to allow accurate beliefs to spread within a community and keep less accurate or biased beliefs contained. The practices are meant to serve an analogous purpose to normal hygiene and sanitation in containing disease.
The term was coined in Steve Rayhawk's and Anna Salamon's post "The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice", and there have been several mentions of it around the site. But what, exactly, might good epistemic hygiene norms be?
I'm especially interested in this question in the context of meetup groups. In Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter, Cosmos writes:
Epistemic privilege and meme-sharing: The most powerful aspect of a group of rationalists is that you have an entire class of people whose reasoning you trust. Division of labor arises naturally as each member has different interests, they all pursue a variety of skills and areas of expertise, which they can then bring back to the group. Even the lowest-level rationalists in the group can rapidly upgrade themselves by adopting winning heuristics from other group members. I cannot overstate the power of epistemic privilege. We have rapidly spread knowledge about metabolism, exercise, neuroscience, meditation, hypnosis, several systems of therapy... and don't forget the Dark Arts.
This would imply that one way that a meetup group (or for that matter, any social group) could get really successful would be by adopting great epistemic hygiene norms. But unless everyone present has read most of the Sequences - which gets increasingly unlikely the more the group grows - even most LW meetups probably won't just spontaneously enforce such norms. Wouldn't it be great if there were an existing list of such norms, that each group could look through and then decide which ones they'd like to adopt?
Here are some possible epistemic hygiene norms that I could find / come up with:
And of course, there's a long list of norms that basically amount to "don't be guilty of bias X", e.g. "avoid unnecessarily detailed stories about the future", "avoid fake explanations", "don't treat arguments as soldiers", etc.
Which of these norms do you consider the most valuable? Which seem questionable? Do you have any norms of your own to propose?