The Wobble

A field guide to knowing in unstable conditions

You’ve probably noticed that nobody agrees on what counts as knowing anymore.

Not just politically—though that’s the loudest version of the problem. The deeper issue is that the systems we rely on to stabilize knowledge—expertise, institutions, evidence, peer review, shared standards of proof—are all wobbling at once. AI is accelerating this, but it didn’t start it. The ground was already shifting.

Most responses to this deterioration fall into one of two camps: panic about the collapse of truth, or cheerful advice about thinking more rationally. Neither helps much: the first mistakes instability for catastrophe and the second assumes the problem is in your head, when it’s mostly in the infrastructure.

This newsletter is something different. It draws on the history and philosophy of science—especially the pragmatist tradition—to make sense of what’s happening to knowledge right now. Not to reassure you that everything is fine, and not to teach you to think like a poker player. Instead: to help you see that the machinery of knowing has always been stranger, more provisional, and more interesting than the standard story admits. Seeing this clearly is the first step toward navigating it honestly.

Who writes this

I’m Jonathan Morgan. I have a PhD in the psychological study of religion from Boston University and work as a senior researcher designing computational models for public health and policy. I’ve spent my career working at the intersection of how people form beliefs and how systems shape that process—through cognitive science, the philosophy and history of science, and currently through computational modeling.