RFK Jr's 'Maha' report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies

At a certain point all public communication will just be AIs making content for other AIs, and we can humans can assend to just talking to eachother again.

A lot of times when I ask chatgpt for references on something it sends me dead links or links to something that do not have anything to do with what it claims to be citing. I point that out and then it sends me more of the same. I would not be surprised if they were already working on this to improve that aspect to convince people who actually bother to check sources. I also wonder how many people don’t bother to check and are convinced of its potentially flawed perspectives simply because it delivers some citations that are completely irrelevant

It reminds me of a time I met some kook who was arguing the merits of this dumb bullshit they bought off instagram. It was $800 and claimed to cure anxiety with magnetic power. They sent a word document provided by the company and it was just a bunch of random studies about transcranial direct current stimulation, which is a real thing with some evidence, but was completely unrelated and is based on electrical currents and not magnetic woo woo bullshit.

They could call it “MyFacts” (Doonesbury reference).

Why was the first one flagged? I swear, it's way too easy for truth-hating fascists to kill important subjects on this site.

Did we though?

The triangle design for the stealth plane (I'm not arguing the merits of the design or the plane) to come out Skunkworks came from a radar paper from a Soviet journal -- at least according to book on the topic. As I recall from the book, the Soviet author of the paper, who emigrated to the States in the 90s (?), said he wasn't too surprised that it was the States and not the Soviets who took his paper seriously.

And here we are revoking visas of international students.

This tells me that in a couple iterations down the road the MAGA admin is not going to take its own government journals seriously either.

By "we" do you mean the TLAs? Cuz all I did was hide under my desk when I saw bright flashes of light.

> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude to processing information, (...) How can we go back to a more stable society once the truth has been systematically eroded?

Well, the last time this happened in the West, it was the conquest of Hellenistic civilization by the Romans, if we believe Lucio Russo's account. This was a gradual process that took centuries, but two notable events in it are the clear-cutting of Plato's Academy by Sulla in 86 BCE (whose soldiers also killed Archimedes) and the lynching of Hypatia by Christians in 415 CE. Western science didn't recover from that until somewhere between the 18th century, when Harrison solved latitude and Lavoisier began cataloging the elements, and 01966, when the Roman Catholic Church ceased to promulgate the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Despite the Dark Ages in the West, science did continue elsewhere in the world, and even progress, but did not reach the general level of Hellenistic science and technology until it resurged in the West after the Renaissance, centuries after the Dark Ages ended. Many places had very stable societies—Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, Australian Aborigines—without it.

So, how can we go back? There's no guarantee we can. But we will go on.

Many things lead to this. A society that gets fooled by clowns. Dehumanization of people from other groups. A system where the checks and balances are more of a convention rather than enforced and one part of the government has too much power to change the other ones. The two party system in general. A long ongoing process to erode democracy and trust in many institutions caused by forces from within and outside. The internet allowing everyone to find and organize with peers for even the most insane ideas, looking legitimate to outsiders because of group sizes we normally hardly see in person. And probably a dozen other reasons each being a tiny problem but resulting in a catastrophe together.

> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude

It was never an agreement. It was more of a victory. One kind of science produced the nitrogen that fed the world; another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2; another produced the wonder drugs - the antibiotics etc - that allowed far more of the population to survive.

It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.

Agreed. In addition to the great historical observations below, I notice the progression from “Data Science” to “AI.” Ideally, data sci should have been about applying the scientific method to analyzing data — which should have come down to 1. statistics, by another name and 2. A broader set of procedures which may improve upon classical stats, especially in cases where data doesn’t fit the assumptions of classical statistical procedures. AI, to me anyway, feels all about technology. The methods are built on sound theory and math but the AI products are black boxes, functionally similar to web browsers of course. Prompt engineering is a thing of course, but it feels like ad hoc tinkering, and inevitably leads to overfitting. And rigorous performance evaluation is left to qualitative vibe checking - unless of course you bring in extra tooling like Snorkel - but that’s not part of the core foundation model produce. Anyway, in sum, it feels like we had “science” in the picture for a few years there but it slipped through our fingers starting in 2022-ish

> How on Earth did the system being vandalised and dismantled by these morons ever come into being in the first place?

The saddest part, IMO, is that 20-50% of the population see nothing wrong with all of this. Things will have to get a whole lot worse before there's a chance for them to get better.

You’re calling people with legitimate but equally confused positions morons, while lamenting division.

Truth has been eroded for many decades now and you seem to assume that the lying and murderous government that keeps lying and murdering is the best arbiter and warden of truth through the public schools and systems it enforces to impose its narrative on the minds of the majority of people who are little more than flesh-bots called humans, programmed and flashed over tv and social media.

How could the truth even exist when free speech is under direct assault even in the country in which it is a core feature of the foundational order? Lies and manipulation are not the truth, it’s narcissistic manipulation. The truth cannot even be approached without free speech, free thought, whether you like it or not; because the inverse of free speech is control over your freedom to hear/see. Censorship not only suppresses the speech, it intentionally suppresses people hearing what psychopaths that control the government fear.

It’s basic narcissistic manipulative abuse patterns along with all the same manipulative patterns like manipulative language changes and gaslighting, dark patterns … but at least you can remember “you wouldn’t get beaten if you followed the constantly changing arbitrary rules of how you may or may not think, what you may or may not talk about, and how you have to say things”.

How can the spirit be correct if the evidence backing the claims are non-existent?

We are talking about a guy who says American's are losing their faith in the establishment and science, yet does so using a paper with fabricated references. This is at best hypocrisy and negligence and at worst just more lies from the administration.

مها

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_(name)

How cute, the script even looks like a little flower on its side, with a bent stem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_bint_Mishari_Al_Saud

महा (mahā) 'great'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja

Etc.

Contributing to the collapse of society as we know it seems to be a long term side effect

Brilliance and foresight? I reaLly hope so.

LLMs will basically destroy every open submission forum. It's very sad.

Mahadoop