Journals refuse to correct record on teen “gender” treatments
Some think that the solution to lost trust in science is to remind people that scientists are people too. But so was Mussolini.
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Search engine chatbots may be killing Wikipedia
It’s not clear how this will impact a commonly heard criticism of Wikipedia — bias. Chatbots could be tweaked to spout biased information too.
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Is “emergence” — materialism’s bandaid — bad science?
Maybe but, when addressing the “something from nothing” problem, materialism typically degenerates into promissory materialism: one of these days…
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Young men are losing faith in science? — Yes, but who can blame them?
It’s not a conspiracy theory or misinformation to say that there is a lot of fraud in science right now and restoring trust includes dealing with that.
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The more we study our ancestors, the smarter they turn out to be
Because the local stones were not suitable for making larger tools, the early humans took to using elephant bones instead.
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Top accounting firm tries to get AI to do the writing and… splat!
If undetected AI hallucination continues, after a while, completely erroneous information will become a more significant part of the overall information base.
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The “War on Science” as a Punch-and-Judy show
If Michael Mann really wanted to avoid politicizing science, he could have at least started by setting an example.
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Elon Musk promises Grokipedia — a new version of Wikipedia
Chatbots scrape “answers” from Wikipedia, which makes its views seem “mainstream,” whatever their relationship with reality.
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Life is computation? A good argument for intelligent design!
If life is indeed computation but vastly more complex, the argument for a Programmer beyond this frame of reality seems solid.
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Are we looking for consciousness in the “wrong part” of the brain?
All of this reasoning assumes that human consciousness — the human mind — is local. Located in one single place. It probably isn’t.
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Even a worm’s brain proves hard to explain
If even that 300-neuron brain proves a challenge in materialist terms, consider the human brain (86 billion neurons) intersecting with an immaterial mind.
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Word of the year candidate: Angertainment
George Orwell predicted this. In 1984, the government imposed a daily Two Minute Hate. But in real life, online rage is an addiction and recovery is a choice.
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Researchers: Urgent! Math research fraud is widespread
The system became both mechanized and commercialized. No one was really reading what no one was really writing. Then the dam broke.
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California lawyer learns: AI hallucinations can harm a career
People whose lives are non-fiction — who must raise funds for a serious legal issue — will doubtless be glad to learn that the courts are still non-fiction too.
Read More ›Can we trust Darwin to fix the mess science publishing is in?
Humans can choose their incentives. Darwin’s wasps, by contrast, cannot have any goal other than survival. That’s why the analogy is not useful.
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The fundamental mistake programmers made in designing AIs
Is the error fundamental to that type of system? The company argues that the problem is fixable but just how easy will that be?
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Publishers suing Google over summarizing their stories
Offered summaries, many readers may not to go to the site, where they either pay or provide an audience for advertisers.
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Hundreds of Google workers fired after lodging complaints
This scenario (squabbling over low dollars) is consistent with the firm not making as much money off AI as it had hoped to.
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Flash!: Bigger computers do not just start acting like minds
If this trend continues, amid the nonsense, there will be more reality-based thinking about AI that is more easily accessible than it used to be.
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Anthropic agrees to pay authors for use of work to train chatbots
There will be many more battles but this ruling means that being an original creator remains a viable way to make a living.
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