#falsification

#falsification

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

The format has ginormous link cards at the bottom of the AI summary, which include a thumbnail of no apparent value, the site name, favicon, description, and title.

Computer programs that check mathematical arguments have existed for decades, but translating a human-written proof into the strict programming language of a computer is extremely time-consuming, often taking months or even years.

Google AI mode has added an 'Ask about this' option above the sources where all URLs are displayed. Clicking on 'Ask about' here automatically pulled a new prompt into the search box.

A growing number of AI tools can detect fraudulent elements in papers, but they can be expensive to use. Such tools are probably better deployed by journal publishers rather than individual reviewers, says Elisabeth Bik, a science-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California, especially because feeding unpublished content into AI tools can compromise confidentiality and is generally frowned on during peer review.

I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.

Fifty-four seconds. That's how long it took Raphael Wimmer to write up an experiment that he did not actually perform, using a new artificial-intelligence tool called Prism, released by OpenAI last month. "Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier," wrote Wimmer, a researcher in human-computer action at the University of Regensburg in Germany, on Bluesky. Large language models (LLMs) can suggest hypotheses, write code and draft papers, and AI agents are automating parts of the research process.

Designed for a comparative literature course on medieval and Renaissance-era writing and announced by UCLA at the end of 2024, the digital textbook was immediately met with widespread mockery and derision from educators. Its AI-generated cover was riddled with incomprehensible text - "Of Nerniacular Latin To An Evoolitun On Nance Langusages," for example - and featured generic visuals that had little to do with the period it was supposedly covering. At the time, Elizabeth Landers, a grad student who helped put together the volume, said that the errors "aren't a failure of AI." Instead, she argued, "they're an intentional artistic choice that prompts students to question their assumptions about language, meaning and historical truth."

Before enterprises can deploy AI agents that actually work, they need something most organizations don't have: a single, authoritative source of truth.

Three scientists have coined a rather scatological, yet revealing, term: PISS, short for Published In Support of Self. The acronym defines a disconcerting phenomenon. Specialized scientific journals that were once published every two weeks or weekly now churn out special issues every few hours. Previously, these monographs were selective and entrusted to a leading figure in a scientific discipline. Now, even the most mediocre researchers receive a flood of invitations to edit one of these countless special issues, which have become a multi-million dollar business.

A professional philosopher outside the academy walls can act as a popularizer (the goal here is to make philosophy more accessible to the general public), an applied ethicist (the major task is to offer an analysis of various specific moral issues that arise within a society), and a public intellectual (I limit this role to questions that have political connotation). Of course, there are overlaps between these roles and they certainly do not exhaust all possible forms of public engagement of a professional philosopher.

Ever since our ancestors first stood upright and squinted at the horizon, we've been wired to notice patterns. A rustle in the grass might have meant a stalking predator. Dark clouds often meant rain. Those who made these connections and guessed that one thing caused another tended to survive. Over time, this ability to link events became one of our most significant evolutionary advantages. It's how we built tools, tamed fire, and eventually invented Wi-Fi.

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets "to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs."

Making good decisions doesn't merely rely on how much information we take in; it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we've instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation - incorrect information that doesn't align with factual reality - then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.

A drawn circle is at least something physical. You can see it, touch it, erase it. The skeptic can still say, "Circles are grounded in physical reality. Justice is different; it's just an idea in your head." So let's talk about the number two. Point to it. Not two apples, not two fingers, not a numeral on a page-that's just a symbol.

Many philosophers strike me as like Polish apparatchiks in 1983-they turn up to work and do what they did yesterday just because they don't know what else to do, not because they seriously believe in the system they are maintaining. I think it's not been fully appreciated how much of a blow it is to the confidence of the field's youth that scientific ambitions are increasingly abandoned as untenable.