RESUMO
This paper introduces three new concepts: epistemic health, epistemic immunity, and epistemic inoculation. Epistemic health is a measure of how well an entity (e.g. person, community, nation) is functioning with regard to various epistemic goods or ideals. It is constituted by many different factors (e.g. possessing true beliefs, being disposed to make reliable inferences), is improved or degraded by many different things (e.g. research funding, social trust), and many different kinds of inquiry are relevant to its study. Epistemic immunity is the robustness with which an entity is resistant to performing certain kinds of epistemic activity, such as questioning certain ideas, believing certain sources, or making certain inferences. Epistemic inoculation occurs when social, political or cultural processes cause an entity to become immune to engaging in certain epistemic activities. After outlining each of these concepts, we close by considering some of the risks associated with attempts to improve others' epistemic health.
RESUMO
Studies establishing the use of new antidepressants often rely simply on proving efficacy of a new compound, comparing against placebo and single compound. The advent of large online databases in which patients themselves rate drugs allows for a new Big Data-driven approach to compare the efficacy and patient satisfaction with sample sizes exceeding previous studies. Exemplifying this approach with antidepressants, we show that patient satisfaction with a drug anticorrelates with its release date with high significance, across different online user-driven databases. This finding suggests that a systematic reevaluation of current, often patent-protected drugs compared to their older predecessors may be helpful, especially given that the efficacy of newer agents relative to older classes of antidepressants such as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) is as yet quantitatively unexplored.