Which Ways of Knowing Actually Work?
Building an Epistemology Tier List
When your car makes a strange noise, you don't read Thomas Kuhn. You call a mechanic. When you need the boiling point of water, you don't meditate on first principles. You Google it. This gap between philosophical theory and everyday practice reveals something crucial: we already know that some ways of finding truth work better than others. We just haven't admitted it.
Every day, you navigate a deluge of information (viral TikToks, peer-reviewed studies, advice from your grandmother, the 131st thought experiment about shrimp, and so forth) and you instinctively rank their credibility. You've already solved much of epistemology in practice. The problem is that this practical wisdom vanishes the moment we start theorizing about knowledge. Suddenly we're debating whether all perspectives are equally valid or searching for the One True Scientific Method™, while ignoring the judgments we successfully make every single day.
But what if we took those daily judgments seriously? Start with the basics: We're born. We look around. We try different methods to understand the world, and attempt to reach convergence between them. Some methods consistently deliver: they cure diseases, triple crop yields, build bridges that don't collapse, and predict eclipses. Others sound profound but consistently disappoint. The difference between penicillin and prayer healing isn't just a matter of cultural perspective. It's a matter of what works.
This essay makes our intuitive rankings explicit. Think of it as a tier list for ways of knowing, ranking them from S-tier (literacy and mathematics) to F-tier (arguing on Twitter) based on their track record. The goal isn't philosophical purity but building a practical epistemology, based on what works in the real world.
Part I: The Tiers of Truth
What Makes a Method Great?
What separates S-tier from F-tier? Three things: efficiency (how much truth per unit effort), reliability (how often and consistently it works), and track record (what has it actually accomplished). By efficiency, I mean bang-for-buck: literacy is ranked highly not just because it works, but because it delivers extraordinary returns on humanity's investment compared to, say, cultural evolution's millennia of trial and error through humanity’s history and pre-history.
A key component of this living methodology is what Taleb calls "Wittgenstein's ruler": when you measure a table with a ruler, you're learning about both the table and the ruler. Every time we use a method to learn about the world, we should ask: "How well did that work?" This constant calibration is how we build a reliable tier list.
The Ultimate Ranking of Ways to Know
TL;DR: Not all ways of knowing are equal. Literacy (S+) and math (S) dominate everything else. Most philosophy (D tier) is overrated. Cultural evolution (F tier) is vastly overrated. Update your methods based on what actually works, not what sounds sophisticated or open-minded.
S+ Tier: Literacy/Reading
The peak tool of human epistemology. Writing allows knowledge to accumulate across generations, enables precise communication, and creates external memory that doesn't degrade. Every other method on this list improved once we could write about it. Whether you’re reading an ancient tome, browsing the latest article on Google search, or carefully digesting a timeless essay on the world’s best Substack, the written word has much to offer you in efficiently transmitting the collected wisdom of generations. If you can only have access to one way of knowing, literacy is by far your best bet.
S Tier: Mathematical Modeling
Math allows you to model the world. This might sound obvious, but it is at heart a deep truth about our universe. From the simplest arithmetic that allows shepherds and humanity’s first tax collector to count sheep to the early geometrical relationships and calculations that allowed us to deduce that the Earth is round to sophisticated modern-day models in astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and high finance, mathematical models allow us to discover and predict the natural patterns of the world with absurd precision.
Further, mathematics, along with writing and record-keeping, allows States to impose their rigor on the chaos of the human world to build much of modern civilization, from the Babylonians to today.
A Tier: [Intentionally empty]
Nothing quite bridges the gap between humanity’s best tools above and the merely excellent tools below.
B Tier: Mimicry, Science, and Engineering
Three distinct but equally powerful approaches:
Mimicry: When you don't know how to cook, you watch someone cook. Heavily underrated by intellectuals. As Cate Hall argues in How To Be Instantly Better at Anything, mimicking successful people is one of the most successful ways to become better at your preferred task.
Ultimately, less accessible than reading (you need access to experts), less reliable than mathematics (you might copy inessential features), but often extremely effective, especially for practical skills and tacit knowledge that resists verbalization.
Science: Hypothesis-driven investigation.RCTs, controlled experiments, systematic observation. The strength is in isolation of variables and statistical power. The weakness is in artificial conditions and replication crises. Still, when done right, it's how we learned that germs cause disease and DNA carries heredity.
Engineering: Design under constraints. As Vincenti points out in What Engineers Know and How They Know It, many of our greatest engineering marvels were due to trial and error, where the most important prototypes and practical progress far predates the scientific theory that comes later. Thus, engineering should not be seen as merely "applied science": it's a distinct way of knowing. Engineers learn through building things that must work in the real world, with all its fine-grained details and trade-offs. Engineering knowledge is often embodied in designs, heuristics, and rules of thumb rather than theories. A bridge that stands for a century is its own kind of truth. Engineering epistemology gave us everything from Roman aqueducts to airplanes, often before science could explain precisely why it worked.
Scientific and engineering progress have arguably been a major source of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and likely saved hundreds of millions if not billions of lives through engineering better vaccines and improved plumbing alone. So why do I only consider them to be B-tier techniques, given how effective they are? Ultimately, I think their value, while vast in absolute terms, are dwarfed by writing and mathematics, which were critical for civilization and man’s conquest over nature.
B-/C+ Tier: Statistical Analysis, Natural Experiments
Solid tools with a somewhat more limited scope. Statistics help us see patterns in noise (and sometimes patterns that aren't there). Natural experiments let us learn from variations we didn't create. Both are powerful when used correctly, but somewhat limited in power and versatility compared to epistemic tools in the S and B tiers.
C Tier: Expert Intuition, Historical Analysis, Frameworks and Meta-Narratives, Forecasting/Prediction Markets
Often brilliant, often misleading. Experts develop good intuitions in narrow domains with clear feedback loops (chess grandmasters, firefighters). But expertise can easily become overwrought and yield little if any predictive value (as with much of political punditry). Historical patterns sometimes rhyme but often don't, and frequently our historical analysis becomes a Rorschach test for our pre-existing beliefs and desires.
I also put frameworks and meta-narratives (like Bayesianism, Popperism, naturalism, rationalism, idealism, postmodernism, and, well, this post’s framework) at roughly C-tier. Epistemological frameworks and meta-narratives1 refine thinking but aren’t the primary engines of discovery.
Finally, I put some of the more new-fangled epistemic tools (forecasting, prediction markets, epistemic betting in general, other new epistemic technologies) at roughly this tier. They show significant promise, but have a very limited track record to date2.
D Tier: Thought Experiments, Pure Logic, Introspection, Non-expert intuitions, debate.
Thought experiments clarify concepts you already understand but rarely discover new truths. Pure logic is only as good as your premises. Introspection tells you about your mind, not the world. Vastly overrated by people who think for a living.
In many situations, the philosophical equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Thought experiments can clarify concepts you already understand, but rarely discover new truths. They also frequently cause people to confuse themselves and others. Pure logic is only as good as your premises, and sometimes worse. Introspection tells you about your own mind, but the lack of external grounding again weakens any conclusions you can get out of it. Non-expert intuitions can be non-trivially truth-tracking, but are easily fooled by a wide range of misapplied heuristics and cognitive biases. Debate suffers from similar issues, in addition to turning truth-seeking to a verbal cleverness contest.
These tools are far from useless, but vastly overrated by people who think for a living.
F Tier: Folk Wisdom, Cultural Evolution, Divine Revelation "My grandmother always said..." "Ancient cultures knew..." "It came to me in a dream..."
Let's be specific about cultural evolution, since Henrich's The Secret of Our Success has made it trendy. It's genuinely fascinating that Fijians learned to process manioc to remove cyanide without understanding chemistry. It's clever that some societies use divination to randomize hunting locations. But compare manioc processing to penicillin discovery, randomized hunting to GPS satellites, traditional boat-building to the Apollo program.
Cultural evolution is real and occasionally produces useful knowledge. But it's slow, unreliable, and limited to problems your ancestors faced repeatedly over generations. When COVID hit, folk wisdom offered better funeral rites; science delivered mRNA vaccines in under a year.
The epistemic methods that gave us antibiotics, electricity, and the internet simply dwarf accumulated folk wisdom's contributions. A cultural evolution supporter might argue that cultural evolution discovered precursors to what I think of as our best tools: literacy, mathematics, and the scientific method. I don't dispute this, but cultural evolution's heyday is long gone. Humanity has largely superseded cultural evolution's slowness and fickleness with faster, more reliable epistemic methods.
F - - Tier: Arguing on Twitter, Facebook comments, watching Tiktok videos, etc. Extremely bad for your epistemics. Can delude you via presenting a facsimile of knowledge. Often worse than nothing. Like joining a gunfight with a SuperSoaker.
What do you think? Which ways of knowing do you think are most underrated? Overrated?
Ultimately, the exact positions on the tier list doesn’t matter all too much. The core perspectives I want to convey are a) the idea and saliency of building a tier list at all, and b) some ideas for how one can use and update such a tier list. The rest, ultimately, is up to you.
Part II: Building A Better Mental Toolkit
Wittgenstein’s Ruler: Calibrate through use
Remember Wittgenstein's ruler. When ancient astronomers used math to predict eclipses and succeeded, they learned math was reliable. When alchemists used elaborate theories to turn lead into gold and failed, they learned those frameworks weren't.
Every time you use an epistemic method (reading a study, introspection, RCTs, consulting an expert) to learn about the world, you should also ask: "How well did that work?" We're constantly running this calibration, whether consciously or not.
A good epistemic process is a lens that sees its own flaws. By continuously honing your models against reality, improving them, and adjusting their rankings, you can slowly hone your lenses and improve your ability to see your own world.
Contextual Awareness
The tier list ranks general-purpose power, not universal applicability. Studying the social psychology of lying? Math (S-tier) won't help much. You'll need to read literature (S+), look for RCTs (B), maybe consult experts (C).
But if you then learn that social psychology experiments often fail to replicate and that many studies are downright fraudulent, you might conclude that you should trust your intuitions over the published literature3. Context matters.
Explore/Exploit Tradeoffs in Methodology
How do you know when to trust your tier list versus when to update it? This is a classic "explore/exploit" problem.
Exploitation: For most day-to-day decisions, exploit your trusted, high-tier methods. When you need the boiling point of water, you read it (S+ Tier); you don't derive it from thought experiments (D Tier).
Exploration: Periodically test lower-tier or unconventional methods. Try forecasting on prediction markets, play with thought experiments, and even interrogate your own intuitions on novel situations. Most new methods fail, but successful ones can transform your thinking.
One way to improve long-term as a thinker is staying widely-read and open-minded, always seeking new conceptual tools. When I first heard about Wittgenstein's ruler, I thought it was brilliant. Many of my thoughts on metaepistemology immediately clicked together. Conversely, I initially dismissed anthropic reasoning as an abstract exercise with zero practical value. Years later, I consider it one of the most underrated thought-tools available.
Don't just assume new methods are actually good. Most aren't! But the gems that survive rigorous vetting and reach high spots on your epistemic tier list can more than compensate for the duds.
Consilience: The Symphony of Evidence
How do you figure out a building’s height? You can:
Eyeball it
Google it
Count floors and multiply
Drop an object from the top and time the object’s fall
Use a barometer at the top and bottom to measure air pressure change
Measure the building’s shadow when the sun is at 45 degrees
Check city blueprints
Come up with increasingly elaborate thought experiments involving trolley problems, googleplex shrimp, planefuls of golf balls and Hilbert's Hotel, argue how careful ethical and metaphysical reasoning can reveal the right height, post your thoughts online, and hope someone in the comments knows the answer
When multiple independent methods give you the same answer, you can trust it more. Good conclusions rarely depend on just one source. E.O. Wilson calls this convergence of evidence consilience: your best defense against any single method's flaws.
And just as consilience of evidence increases trust in results, consilience of methods increases trust in the methods themselves. By checking different approaches against each other, you can refine your toolkit even when reliable data is scarce.
Part III: Why Other Frameworks Fail
Four Failed Approaches
Monism
The most common epistemological views fall under what I call the monist ("supremacy") framework. Monists believe there's one powerful framework that unites all ways of acquiring knowledge.
The (straw) theologian says: "God reveals truth through Biblical study and divine inspiration."
The (straw) scientist4 says: "I use the scientific method. Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. Everything else is speculation."
The (straw) philosopher5 says: "Through careful reasoning and thought experiments, we can derive fundamental truths about reality."
The (straw) Bayesian says6: "Bayesian probability theory describes optimal reasoning. Update your priors according to the evidence."
In my ranking system, these true believers place their One True Way of Knowing in the "S" tier, with everything else far below.
Pluralism
Pluralists7 or relativists believe all ways of knowing are equally valid cultural constructs, with no particular method better at ascertaining truth than others. They place all methods at the same tier.
Adaptationism
Adaptationists believe culture is the most important source of knowledge. Different ways of knowing fit different environments: there's no objectively best method, only methods that fit well in environmentally contingent situations.
For them, "Cultural Evolution" ranks S-tier, with everything else contingently lower.
Nihilism
Postmodernists and other nihilists believe that there isn’t a truth of the matter about what is right and wrong (“Who’s to say, man?”). Instead, they believe that claims to 'truth' are merely tools used by powerful groups to maintain control. Knowledge reflects not objective reality, but constructs shaped by language, culture, and power dynamics.
Why They’re Wrong
“All models are wrong, but some are useful” - George EP Box
"There are more methods of knowledge acquisition in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - Hamlet, loosely quoted
I believe these views are all importantly misguided. My approach builds on a more practical and honest assessment of how knowledge is actually constructed.
Unlike nihilists, I think truth matters. Nihilists correctly see that our methods are human, flawed, and socially constructed, but mistakenly conclude this makes truth itself arbitrary. A society that cannot appreciate truth cannot solve complex problems like nuclear war or engineered pandemics. It becomes vulnerable to manipulation, eroding the social trust necessary for large-scale cooperation. Moreover, their philosophy is just so ugly: by rejecting truth, postmodernists miss out on much that is beautiful and good about the world.
Unlike monists, I think our epistemic tools matter far more than our frameworks for thinking about them. Monists correctly see that rigor yields better results, but mistakenly believe all knowledge derives from a "One True Way," whether it's the scientific method, pure reason, or Bayesian probability. But many ways of knowing don't fit rigid frameworks. Like a foolish knight reshaping his trustworthy sword to fit his new scabbard, monists contort tools of knowing to fit singular frameworks.
Frameworks are only C-Tier, and that includes this one! The value isn't in the framework itself, but in how it forces you to consciously evaluate your tools. The tier list is a tool for calibrating other tools, and should be discarded if it stops being useful.
The real work of knowledge creation is done by tools themselves: literacy, mathematical modeling, direct observation, mimicry. No framework is especially valuable compared to humanity's individual epistemic tools. A good framework fits around our tools rather than forcing tools to conform to it.
Finally, contra pluralists and adaptationists, some ways of knowing are simply better. Pluralists correctly see that different methods provide value, but mistakenly declare them all equally valid. Astrology might offer randomness and inspiration, but it cannot deliver sub-3% infant mortality rates or land rovers on Mars. Results matter.
The methods that reliably cure diseases, feed the hungry, and build modern civilization are, quite simply, better than those that do not.
My approach takes what works from each of these views while avoiding their blind spots. It's built on the belief that while many methods are helpful and all are flawed, they can and should be ranked by their power and reliability. In short: a tier list for finding truth.
Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.13352 A wise raven uses many tools that are fit-for-purpose, rather than adopt a rigid philosophy of science that limits access to her favorite tools
Part IV: Putting It All to Work
Critical Thinking is Built on a Scaffolding of Facts
Having a tiered list of methods for thought can be helpful, but it's useless without facts to test your models against and leverage into acquiring new knowledge.
A common misconception is that critical thinking is a pure, abstract skill. In reality, your ability to think critically about a topic depends heavily on the quantity and quality of facts you already possess. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it:
Critical thinking is not just formulas to be taught but knowledge and experience to be acquired and tested and re-examined, along with habits and skills that can be demonstrated and practiced. But there is no separating the “process” from the “substance”.
Suppose you want to understand the root causes of crime in America. Without knowing basic facts like that crime has mostly fallen for 30 years, your theorizing is worthless. Similarly, if you do not know anything about crime outside of the US, your ability to think critically about crime will be severely hampered by lack of cross-country data.
The methods on the tier list are tools for building a dense, interconnected scaffolding of facts. The more facts you have (by using the S+ tier method of reading trusted sources on settled questions), the more effectively you can use your methods to acquire new facts, build new models, interrogate existing ones, and form new connections.
The Quest For Truth
The truth is out there, and we have better and worse ways of finding it.
We began with a simple observation: in daily life, we constantly rank our sources of information. Yet we ignore this practical wisdom when discussing "epistemology," getting lost in rigid frameworks or relativistic shrugs. This post aims to integrate that practical wisdom.
The tier list I've presented isn't the final word on knowledge acquisition, but a template for building your own toolkit. The specific rankings matter less than the core principles:
Critical thinking requires factual scaffolding. You can't think critically about topics you know little about. Use high-tier methods to build dense, interconnected knowledge that enables better reasoning and new discoveries.
Not all ways of knowing are equal. Literacy and mathematics have transformed human civilization in ways that folk wisdom and introspection haven't.
Your epistemic toolkit must evolve. Use Wittgenstein's ruler: every time you use a method to learn about the world, you're also learning about that method's reliability. Calibrate accordingly.
Consilience is your friend. True beliefs rarely rest on a single pillar of evidence. When multiple independent methods converge, you can be more confident you're on the right track.
Frameworks should be lightweight and unobtrusive. The real work happens through concrete tools: reading, calculating, experimenting, building. Our theories of knowledge should serve these tools, not the reverse.
This is more than a philosophical exercise. Getting this right has consequences at every scale. Societies that can't distinguish good evidence from propaganda won't solve climate change or handle novel pandemics. Democracies falter when slogans are more persuasive than solutions..
Choosing to think rigorously isn't the easiest path. It demands effort and competes with the simpler pleasures of comforting lies and tribal dogma. But it helps us solve our hardest problems and push back against misinformation, ignorance, and sheer stupidity. In coming years, it may become a fundamental skill for our continued survival and sanity.
So read voraciously (S+ tier). Build mathematical intuition (S tier). Learn from masters (B tier). Build things that must work in the real world (B tier). And try to form your own opinions about the best epistemic tools you are aware of, and how to reach consilience between them.
As we face challenges that will make COVID look like a tutorial level, the quality of our collective epistemology may determine whether we flourish or perish. This tier list is my small contribution to the overall project of thinking clearly. Far from perfect, but hopefully better than pretending all methods are equal or that One True Method exists.
May your epistemic tools stay sharp, your tier list well-calibrated, and your commitment to truth unwavering. The future may well depend on it.
What do you think? Which ways of knowing do you think are most underrated? Overrated? What other categories would you add to this tier list?
Wrestling with these questions is exactly why this substack ("Linch: The art of noticing what matters") exists: to explore, from multiple angles, how humans actually learn true information and how we can get better at it. This post was my most challenging to write yet, partially because ranking our fundamental ways of knowing forced me to confront just how limited and fragile my own understanding of many of humanity’s most important concepts can be.
If these questions intrigue you and you'd like to dive deeper into specific methods and their real-world applications, please subscribe! And if this post resonated with you, I'd be eternally grateful if you can share it on social media, crosspost to your favorite forum, or send it to one specific friend who enjoys thinking deeply about how we know what we know.
I think Bayesianism is fine and take it seriously myself. But I also, for reasons enumerated later in the post, think it’s neither descriptively how people in practice form their beliefs nor normatively what embedded agents with flesh-and-blood bodies ought to fully aspire to.
Both the costs and benefits to these tools have been very low to date. In my opinion, reasonable people can put them at anywhere from B- to F tier. I put them relatively highly for now but my opinion is loosely held and subject to change based on future results; I think it’s more likely that they’d go down in tiers rather than go up. Incidentally, AI assisted thinking is also at this tier. Though I expect it to move up over time as model capacities improve, assuming we solve sycophancy and related issues (or obviate them).
You might also have evolutionary and empirical reasons to believe that our intuitions for individual and small-group psychology to be better than say, our intuitions for the physics of very small objects (quantum mechanics), or our intuitions for the asset organizations of millions of people (monetary finance and macroeconomics).
In philosophy of science, this view might be described as a sub-branch of the empiricist view, possibly known as “logical positivist” (though it’s a dirty phrase).
Strictly speaking, this view will be best described in academic philosophy as the “rationalist” view
Standpoint epistemology is another common view in this vein, though sometimes it blends into nihilism
Love the article! Generally agree with your rankings, but I do think you put math too high. I don't see how it can be higher than science. And I say this as someone who loves math and has a (pure) math PhD. I just think a mathematical model is only as good as the assumptions behind it, and I think math can give a false sense of the reliability of an answer.
But as you say the precise rankings aren't critical, it's just a good idea to keep a rough idea of how useful a given method has been over time. Consilience (a word I was not aware of previously) is key.
A lot of the reason thought experiments are in D-tier is because at a fundamental level, the need to substantially idealize thought experiments means that thought experiment solutions don't transfer often to our messy world, and any theoretic blocker in thought experiments may not matter for our world specifically.