URL: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/epistemology
It's my contention that the cause is mostly epistemic: people in power know things and think of knowledge in ways that leave minorities unable to know things, and the explosions are a natural consequence of what lurks in their blind spots.
Knowledge, however, is quite a bit downstream of what I've described above: for a social group to think of something as knowledge, there needs to be a broad agreement as to what it is to know something and what isn't knowledge, even if it looks like it. Figuring out what counts as knowledge in a given context is thus an empirical question as much as one of causal reasoning.
It was made clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that my inability to make the CDO's approach work was a defect in me, and I was instructed to continue attempting to make the method work without changing anything. In this particular case, presenting evidence that went against what the institution decided was knowledge led to me being beaten down until my voiced experience conformed to the organisation's knowledge structure.
The consequence of this is that people who a) look the most like the people in power and b) that say things that hew the most closely to what people in power say are held to know the most. This is a fairly standard human heuristic: people who meet expectations the most tend to be trusted the most, but that doesn't make it any less bad.
Quite simply, if we demand the right to be able to know things, we will be harassed, denied opportunities and eventually starved, made homeless and arrested. This is violence by any measure, and the only way to avoid it is, it seems, to deliberately avoid communicating what we know or claiming to know things at all. This is a fucking inhuman expectation to have.
People have a finite tolerance for being disrespected and disregarded. It can sometimes be a very high tolerance, but it's always finite, and when exceeded, it always leads to negative consequences.