Related papers: A quick how-to user-guide to debunking pseudoscien…
Edgar Allan Poe noted, "Truth often lurks in the shadow of error," highlighting the deep complexity intrinsic to the interplay between truth and falsehood, notably under conditions of cognitive and informational asymmetry. This dynamic is…
Language models can be persuaded to abandon factual knowledge. This vulnerability is central to AI safety, but its internal mechanism remains poorly understood. We uncover a compact causal mechanism for persuasion-induced factual errors. A…
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
(l) I have enough evidence to render the sentence S probable. (la) So, relative to what I know, it is rational of me to believe S. (2) Now that I have more evidence, S may no longer be probable. (2a) So now, relative to what I know, it is…
Probability models are only useful at explaining the uncertainty of what we do not know, and should never be used to say what we already know. Probability and statistical models are useless at discerning cause. Classical statistical…
A knowledge system S describing a part of real world does in general not contain complete information. Reasoning with incomplete information is prone to errors since any belief derived from S may be false in the present state of the world.…
Disinformation spreads among the public and in scientific discourse through the actions of individuals, organizations, and governments that distort scholarly communications, media narratives, and institutional trust. This taxonomy…
In this article, we examine specific scenes from popular action and sci-fi movies and show how they blatantly break the laws of physics, all in the name of entertainment, but coincidentally contributing to science illiteracy.
In order to gain a mechanistic understanding of how tinnitus emerges in the brain, we must build biologically plausible computational models that mimic both tinnitus development and perception, and test the tentative models with brain and…
Is the accelerating expansion of the Universe true, inferred through observations of distant supernovae, and is the implied existence of an enormous amount of anti-gravitational dark energy material driving the accelerating expansion of the…
With the rise of AI-generated content spewed at scale from large language models (LLMs), genuine concerns about the spread of fake news have intensified. The perceived ability of LLMs to produce convincing fake news at scale poses new…
Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the…
While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities to generate coherent text, they suffer from the issue of hallucinations -- factually inaccurate statements. Among numerous approaches to tackle hallucinations, especially…
Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time, and mitigate its…
Forensic examiners and attorneys need to know how to express evidence in favor or against a prosecutor's hypothesis in a way that avoids the prosecutor's fallacy and follows the modern reporting standards for forensic evidence. This article…
This study presents the first large-scale comparison of persuasion techniques present in crowd- versus professionally-written debunks. Using extensive datasets from Community Notes (CNs), EUvsDisinfo, and the Database of Known Fakes (DBKF),…
In this era of information explosion, deceivers use different domains or mediums of information to exploit the users, such as News, Emails, and Tweets. Although numerous research has been done to detect deception in all these domains,…
Today's social media platforms enable to spread both authentic and fake news very quickly. Some approaches have been proposed to automatically detect such "fake" news based on their content, but it is difficult to agree on universal…
Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric about the so called \emph{collective intelligence}, conspiracy theories -- e.g. global warming induced by chemtrails or the link between vaccines and autism -- find on the Web a natural medium for their…
The World Wide Web provides unrivalled access to information globally, including factual news reporting and commentary. However, state actors and commercial players increasingly spread biased (distorted) or fake (non-factual) information to…