About


I’m CalmBit. I own the place.

Why the name “Dose?”

The obvious, most present answer in my mind is that each article should be a “dose” of knowledge - a carefully controlled, discrete quantity that hopefully benefits the reader in some way.

Epistemics: Huh?

In the vein of Gwern Branwen and his inspiration, Muflax, I’m adding a form of “epistemic” markers to each piece of content I create. I’m hoping that it will serve to solidify my opinions on things, or at least notarize my belief structure in more detail.

(For the uninitiated, I use the term “epistemic” here to denote my reasoning or thought process behind posts and views, to categorize information in a way that reflects its relevancy towards my overall knowledge-base, i.e. whether or not I still believe something to be true, or find it to be useful outside of a niche domain.)

I’m eschewing the semantics Gwern added, as they’re not particularly useful to me. Muflax’s system, as I’m using it (i.e. verbatim)

There are some general tags:

believed - As far as I know, everything on that page is correct. I endorse it as-written and don’t expect there to be more than minor errors.

semi-believed - The general point is fine, but there are important gaps or parts that are significantly less certain than I originally thought. A rewrite can probably save the conclusion, but be careful.

not believed - It’s just wrong and I changed my mind since I wrote it. Sometimes I note why, and sometimes I disown those topics entirely.

speculation - Just some random idea that I wanted to write more about so I could understand it better. I don’t take it seriously, but it was interesting enough to spend some time with it. That’s the default state.

fiction - It’s complicated. Generally speaking, some aspects of it I do believe. Sometimes it represents a marginalized aspect of me. Some days I just don’t want to care about making my reasoning clear; I just want to write something. Or maybe I felt like trolling. Regardless, don’t base your world-view on fiction, please. Fiction is treason.

emotional - Some cluster of ideas that got itself entangled with a complex emotional state, and I needed to externalize it to even look at it. The ideas are in no way endorsed, but writing about them is occasionally necessary (similar to fiction).

log - Log entries that simply describe what happened without any judgment or reflection. I haven’t thought about it much, I just wrote it down.

Importance: Huh?

Again, in the vein of Gwern Branwen, I’ve also included semi-relevant “importance tags” with each post, so that each post can be categorically dissected by its reasonableness along with its relevance.

Like Gwern’s system, this will inevitably manifest itself on a scale between 0 and 10, where 0 is irrelevant outside my own head, and usually just for personal note-keeping, and 10 is “probably interesting to most everyone or at the very least considered to be valuable.”