Living in Entropy: Epistemic Entropy, When Truth Stops Feeling Solid (E3 of 5 in Series)

Understanding Epistemic Entropy: Navigating Information Chaos in the Digital Age

In the third part of the PsyberSpace series on entropy, host Leslie Poston delves into 'epistemic entropy,' exploring how your sense of reality is impacted by chaotic information systems and media. The episode discusses the brain's role as a prediction machine, the strain caused by conflicting information, and the concept of epistemic injustice. Leslie also examines how digital platforms shape our thought processes and offers practical advice for maintaining clarity and agency in an environment overwhelmed by biased and manipulative information streams.

00:00 Introduction to PsyberSpace
00:28 Recap of Previous Episodes
00:59 Understanding Epistemic Entropy
02:29 The Brain as a Prediction Machine
04:19 Information Overload and Pattern Anxiety
05:25 Epistemic Injustice and Power Dynamics
08:39 The Extended Mind and Digital Tools
10:54 Coping Strategies for Epistemic Entropy
13:34 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

Resources:

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 

Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: An active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23. 

Barrett, L. F. (2025). The theory of constructed emotion: More than a feeling. Current Opinion in Psychology, 53, 101817. 

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. J. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19. 

Dotson, K. (2014). Conceptualizing epistemic oppression. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 115–138. 

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press. 

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. 

Friston, K. (2009). The free-energy principle: A rough guide to the brain? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(7), 293–301. 

Clark, A. (2015). Radical predictive processing. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 53(S1), 3–27. 

McEwen, B. S., & Morrison, J. H. (2013). The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron, 79(1), 16–29. 

Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L., & Raita, E. (2012). Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(1), 105–114. 

Tufekci, Z. (2015). Algorithmic harms beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent challenges of computational agency. Colorado Technology Law Journal, 13, 203–218. 

Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. A. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, 348(6239), 1130–1132. 

Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., & Cook, J. (2017). Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 353–369. 

Starbird, K. (2017). Examining the alternative media ecosystem through the production of alternative narratives of mass shooting events on Twitter. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 11(1), 230–239. 

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Episode Transcript

Leslie Poston (00:11):
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host,
Leslie Poston. If you're newhere, this is the show where I
help you understand your worldby helping you see how
psychology, media, culture, andtechnology shape the way you
think, feel, work, and live.Today, we're in the middle of a
five episode series focused onthe entropy age we're all living

(00:34):
through. In the first episode,we stayed close to your inner
life and talked about emotionalentropy, existential anxiety,
ontological insecurity, andanticipatory grief.
In the second episode, wewidened the focus and talked
about system decay, collectivestress, and what happens when

(00:56):
institutions feel hollow orunsafe. Today, we're going a
little deeper into how yoursense of reality and what is
true or false gets shaped byinformation systems and media.
You may have noticed that itfeels harder to know what's
going on or who to trust. Youscroll through a feed and see

(01:16):
confident statements thatcontradict each other. Read
headlines that feel designed toprovoke, not inform.
Friends and family seem to livein different fact universes even
though you share a language andsometimes a household. After a
while, it's not just that thecontent is confusing. Reality

(01:37):
itself starts to feel a bitunstable. In this episode, I
wanna talk about epistemicentropy. Epistemic entropy is my
way of putting a name to thescatter and instability that
shows up when the systems youuse to make sense of events are
noisy, biased, or bent towardprofit and power and not

(01:59):
clarity.
We'll look at how your braintries to build a coherent
picture from messy inputs, howunequal access to credibility
shapes who gets believed, andhow digital platforms act like
extensions of your mind forbetter or for worse. The goal is
not to tell you which sourcesare good and which are bad, but

(02:21):
to help you understand what yourmind is up against when the
truth stops feeling solid. Let'sstart with what your brain is
trying to do all day long. Manycognitive scientists describe
the brain as a predictionmachine. Instead of passively
recording facts, it constantlygenerates guesses about what

(02:44):
will happen next and updatesthose guesses with new
information.
We talked about this in-depth ona recent episode about how
everyone has a differentreality. This idea shows up in
work by researchers like CarlFriston and others who study
predictive processing. Ineveryday life, this means your
brain is always asking questionslike, what usually happens here?

(03:08):
What should I expect from thisperson? What kind of day is this
going to be based on thisinformation?
It uses patterns you've alreadylearned to reduce surprise and
keep you oriented in your day,space, and time. Under
conditions of epistemic entropy,these patterns become harder to

(03:29):
rely on. Your feeds mix news,jokes, sponsored content,
propaganda, and personal updatesin one continuous scroll.
Algorithms are tuned to maximizeengagement, not accuracy. So the
material that rises to the topis often what's most emotional,
polarizing, or sticky ratherthan what's calm, nuanced, or

(03:52):
well supported.
Your predictive brain is tryingto form a stable picture from
inputs that aren't stable. Oneday a topic is presented as an
urgent crisis, and the next dayit's barely mentioned. One
outlet frames an event as proofof progress while another frames
the same event as evidence ofcollapse. Friends share

(04:14):
interpretations of these eventsthat are shaped by their own
histories, biases, and needs.Over time, this can produce two
kinds of strain.
One is overload. You simplydon't have the cognitive
bandwidth to evaluate everysingle claim, trace every
source, or double check everystatistic. And the way AI is

(04:35):
encroaching on our everydayinformation stream is not
helping this at all. The otheris what we might call pattern
anxiety. Your brain keepsreaching for a stable story that
fits the signals you see, butthe signals are inconsistent and
often manipulated.
People respond in different waysto this stress. Some of us clamp

(04:56):
down on a single narrative andrefuse to engage with anything
that threatens it. Others of usfloat between narratives and
start to treat all claims asequally shaky. A few of us step
back from the news andinformation altogether and say,
I just can't deal with thisanymore. None of these are signs
that people are lazy oruncurious.

(05:17):
They're mostly signs thatpredictive brains are trying to
cope with chaotic feeds. There'sanother layer to epistemic
entropy that has less to do withinformation volume and more to
do with power. PhilosopherMiranda Fricker uses the term
epistemic injustice to describethe ways that some people are

(05:39):
unfairly disadvantaged asknowers. One form is testimonial
injustice where a person's wordis given less weight because of
assumptions made about theiridentity. Another is
hermeneutical injustice wherepeople lack shared concepts and
language to describe theirexperiences, which makes it hard

(05:59):
for those experiences to berecognized and believed.
You can see this in howdifferent voices are treated in
public debates. When a worker, apatient, or a marginalized
person describes harm, theiraccount may be dismissed as
emotional, biased, or anecdotal.When a person from a more

(06:20):
privileged group says the exactsame thing, it may be treated as
groundbreaking. When a communityraises 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 becomesimpossible to deny. In a media

(06:41):
environment, epistemic injusticeshapes whose stories get
amplified, whose analysis istreated as expert, and whose
perspective is treated asoptional.
This doesn't just affectindividuals. It affects the
collective map of reality. Ifcertain groups are persistently
disbelieved or ignored, theshared picture of what is

(07:02):
happening will be distorted inpredictable directions.
Hermeneutical injustice addsanother twist. If there's no
widely understood term for whatyou're going through, it's
harder to explain it to othersand sometimes even to yourself.
Before people had a phrase likesexual harassment, for example,
many experiences were scatteredand misnamed. The same is true

(07:24):
today for forms of harm createdby platform design, algorithmic
bias, or slow motion policychanges. People can feel
something is wrong, butavailable language doesn't quite
fit, so the experience remainsprivate and easier to discount.
When you place epistemicinjustice inside late stage

(07:45):
capitalism and system decay, youget a very specific flavor of
epistemic entropy. It's not justthat the information is messy.
It's that the messiness isstructured. Certain interests
have more access to megaphones.Certain identities are coded as
credible by default. Certainharms fall through gaps in our

(08:06):
shared language. For listeners,understanding this can reduce
self blame.
If you struggle to feelconfident about what you know,
you're not just dealing withpersonal uncertainty. You're
navigating a knowledge landscapethat's been shaped shaped by
power. For you, understandingthis can reduce any self blame

(08:28):
you may feel. If you struggle tofeel confident about what you
know, you're not dealing withpersonal uncertainty alone.
You're navigating a knowledgelandscape that's been shaped by
power.
Another idea that helps makesense of epistemic entropy comes
from Clark and Chalmers whowrote about the extended mind.
The basic claim is that thinkingdoes not only happen inside your

(08:51):
skull. It also happens throughtools, devices, notes, and other
people that you use as part ofyour cognitive process. Think
about how you use your phone.You outsource memory to a
calendar, contacts, saved links,photos.
You outsource navigation tomaps. You're outsourcing some
judgment about what matters tothe app algorithms and feeds you

(09:15):
open each day. You evenoutsource the emotional labor of
friendship to apps likeFacebook, which we talked about
in another episode. Over time,these tools become part of how
you think and decide, not justthings you use occasionally. In
theory, this could besupportive.
Carefully designed tools canhelp you store information, see
patterns, and coordinate withother people. Under late stage

(09:38):
capitalism, however, many of thetools you rely on are built by
companies whose business modelsdepend on capturing and selling
your attention. That means theextended parts of your mind are
not neutral. They are shaped byadvertising, engagement metrics,
and design choices aimed atkeeping you scrolling.
Notifications interrupt yourconcentration, recommendations

(10:00):
lean toward content thatprovokes reaction, and
interfaces are updated based onwhat keeps users hooked, not
what supports clear thinking.
From a psychological point ofview, this is like having a
noisy collaborator inside yourthought process. You sit down to
check one fact and find yourselftwenty minutes later watching a
chain of suggested clips. Youopen a messaging app to connect

(10:24):
with a friend and are pulledinto a trending topic that
raises your stress level. Thetools that could help you manage
epistemic entropy insteadcontribute to it. This doesn't
mean you need to discard everydevice or account.
It does mean that part of yourthinking now happens in spaces
that are not aligned with yourwell-being. Recognizing that can

(10:44):
help you treat some of yourconfusion 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 magicallyrestores certainty. Epistemic
entropy is tied to deepstructural issues at media,

(11:05):
economics, and politics.
No individual habit can cancelthat out. But there are ways to
relate to this environment thatprotect a little bit more of
your clarity and agency. One isto adjust your standards for
what counts as enough knowledgefor daily decisions. You simply
can't research every topic atthe level of a specialist and

(11:28):
you're competing with inaccurateAI summaries almost everywhere
you look right now. You candecide which domains matter most
for your life and values, whichsources offer you the most
unvarnished truth notcontaminated with technology,
and invest more care there whileallowing yourself to be less
certain in areas that are lesscentral.

(11:49):
Another is to pay attention notonly to what information you
take in, but how thatinformation makes you feel and
act. Another is to pay attentionnot only to what information you
take in, but how thatinformation makes you feel and
act. If a source leaves youconsistently panicked, numb, or
hostile with very little senseof next steps, that's an

(12:11):
indicator that the source maynot be trustworthy. If another
source leaves you more orientedand able to think, that source
may be more trustworthy, but youstill need to check the veracity
of what that source is tellingyou. Some of these difficult
topics can be tricky tounderstand.
You can also build small sharedpractices with others. This

(12:33):
might be a group chat where youtrade vetted sources instead of
hot takes, or a regularconversation where you compare
what you've heard and noticegaps when you talk about it with
your friends and trusted family.These don't have to be formal
media literacy workshops oranything like that. There's
simply a way to not carry theepistemic entropy alone and not

(12:57):
rely only on your brain to seekthe truth. And finally, it can
help to name the conditions outloud.
When you catch yourselfthinking, I should know exactly
what's true about this by now,it might be more accurate to
say, I'm trying to form a stablepicture from fragmented, biased,
and manipulated informationstreams. That sentence is less

(13:19):
catchy, but it's more honestabout the situation. And
remember, the goal is not tobecome perfectly informed. The
goal is to stay human andthoughtful in an environment
that often treats our attentionas a resource to extract. In
this third part of the Entropyseries, I focused on epistemic
entropy, what happens to yoursense of reality when predictive

(13:41):
brains meet chaotic feeds, whenepistemic injustice shapes who
gets believed, and when yourdevices act like extensions of
your mind that are tuned morefor engagement than for clarity.
If any of this matched yourexperience of trying to stay
informed, I hope it helps yousee your confusion, frustration,
or fatigue as a reasonablereaction to the information

(14:03):
system failures around you andnot as proof that you are
failing at being an informedperson. And if this episode
helped, share it with someonewho may have told you, I feel
like I can't tell what's evenreal anymore. They might
appreciate having some languagefor that experience. The show
notes will include research andresources if you want to read
more about the ideas we touchedon today. And next time we're

(14:27):
going to look at power andentropy.
We'll talk about billionaires,tech leaders, and authoritarian
movements, the people andstructures that benefit from
chaos, and what psychology cantell us about why some people
become comfortable or evenenthusiastic about thriving in
conditions that are exhaustingfor everyone else. Thanks for
listening to PsyberSpace. I'myour host, Leslie Poston,

(14:50):
signing off. Remember, staycurious and tune in tomorrow for
the next episode in the serieson entropy.