Jackson Hurley

Essays, notes, and projects

Recent

Jun 22, 2026
Episteme
An open, LLM-administered repository of claims — built, maintained, and served by an LLM-based bureaucracy drawing on humans, research agents, and the rest of civilization's full epistemic stack.
Jun 22, 2026
Canonical forms of claims
Canonical claim wording should be clear and neutral; negations aren't separate claims. “The moon landing was a hoax” is canonical, since the affirmative is what's actually asserted.
Jun 22, 2026
Determining claim importance
Open subproblem: how to rank claims by importance to prioritize maintenance and guide traversal.
Jun 22, 2026
Decomposing documents into claims
The foundational subproblem: reading a corpus and extracting clean, organized claims. An overview of its constituent difficulties.
Jun 22, 2026
Defining edges between claims
Open subproblem: what counts as an edge between claims, and how edges should be typed, directed, and weighted.
Jun 22, 2026
Matching instances of claims to claims in the graph
Finding the claim an extracted proposition corresponds to requires vector search driven by an LLM agent iterating, not a single nearest-neighbor hit.
Jun 22, 2026
Maintaining neutrality while avoiding nihilism
Episteme should resolve contentious factual questions while avoiding three failure modes: overconfident framing, deciding normative claims, and reifying unstable LLM priors.
Jun 22, 2026
Propagating evidence and updates through related claims
Open subproblem: how an update to one claim should propagate to related claims without runaway cascades.
Jun 22, 2026
Splitting vs. lumping similar claims
Like species in biology, claims must be split or lumped. The test: if both sides of an argument agree two propositions are the same claim, they are.
Jun 22, 2026
Structuring the claim graph (Wiki vs. DAG vs. DCG)
Why mechanical Bayesian reasoning over the whole graph fails, and the informal alternative: any claim can parent any other, with relationships carried by Arguments.