Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is accessed—or outright suppressed.
In the digital age, the collaborative and often community-governed effort of scholarly research has gone global and unlocked unprecedented potential to improve our understanding and quality of life. That is, if we let it. Publishers continue to monopolize access to life-saving research and increase the burden on researchers through article processing charges and a pyramid of volunteer labor. This exploitation makes a mockery of open inquiry and the denial of access as a serious human rights issue.
While alternatives like Diamond Open Access are promising, crashing through publishing gatekeepers isn’t enough. Large intermediary platforms are capturing other aspects of the research process—inserting themselves between researchers and between the researchers and these published works—through platformization.
Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has come for research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance. Most professors are now worried their research is being scrutinized by academic bossware, forcing them to worry about arbitrary metrics which don’t always reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat of surveillance in scholarly publishing gives these measures a menacing tilt, chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks spike in the midst of governmental campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge, buttressed by a scourge of platform censorship on corporate social media.
The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open Science and decentralization. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers. Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight. As we’ve seen in EFF’s TOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher education.
Using social media as an example, universities have a strong interest in promoting the work being done at their campuses far and wide. This is where traditional platforms fall short: algorithms typically prioritizing paid content, downrank off-site links, and prioritize sensational claims to drive engagement. When users are free from enshittification and can themselves control the platform’s algorithms, as they can on platforms like Bluesky, scientists get more engagement and find interactions are more useful.
Institutions play a pivotal role in encouraging the adoption of these alternatives, ranging from leveraging existing IT support to assist with account use and verification, all the way to shouldering some of the hosting with Mastodon instances and/or Bluesky PDS for official accounts. This support is good for the research, good for the university, and makes our systems of science more resilient to attacks on science and the instability of digital monocultures.
This subtle influence of intermediaries can also appear in other tools relied on by researchers, while there are a number of open alternatives and interoperable tools developed for everything from citation management, data hosting to online chat among collaborators. Individual scholars and research teams can implement these tools today, but real change depends on institutions investing in tech that puts community before shareholders.
When infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers gain new powers to capture, enshittify, and censor. The result is a system that becomes less useful, less stable, and with more costs put on access. Science thrives on sharing and access equity, and its future depends on a global and democratic revolt against predatory centralized platforms.
My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3 of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually have it recur at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because, even if I beat it back this time, it will likely come back again and again at shorter and shorter intervals. On the other hand, it took long enough that I’m still considered “platinum sensitive” and eligible for treatment with platinum-based drugs, which are currently among the most effective for this cancer. Unfortunately, over time the cancer becomes resistant to it, which makes it very difficult to treat, let alone cure once and for all, and those treatments themselves are fairly caustic and difficult for the rest of the body to endure.
Fortunately there has been some exciting science happening, not just for my cancer but all cancers, to find treatments that, separately or in combination, are more effective, longer lasting, and less toxic in their side effects. For instance, some drugs are being developed that can look for certain characteristics of tumors and then deliver a chemo payload only to cells that have that characteristic, which is more likely to be just be the nefarious malignant ones, thus sparing as many of the rest of the body’s cells as possible the chemo toxicity. For ovarian cancer in particular, which is especially intractable, some drugs find ways to reset the platinum sensitivity so that standard treatments can work effectively again. Others try to defeat the mechanisms themselves that make the cancer so entrenched.
And then there are therapies aimed at getting the immune system on board to help the body rid itself of these nefarious cells. Immune systems spend their days attacking things that don’t belong in healthy bodies, and yet cancers happen because for some reason they can’t manage to recognize or deal with certain cells, which then run amok. So there are a variety of modalities being looked at to help bodies do a better job of hunting these cells down and destroying them before they can get entrenched. Sometimes these therapies involve drugs with direct effects on tumor cells or the tumor cell environment in a way that will deter their proliferation. Other times it’s a therapy designed to reprogram the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy the bad cells, like through T-cell therapy, or, by working with the body’s own “natural killer” cells, which tend to do a better job of remembering the threat and staying on guard against it. And then there are a variety of vaccine possibilities, including some using mRNA technology, all of which are designed to do for an immune system what a vaccine is always designed to do: teach it what a danger looks like and give it what it needs to fight it, ideally without all this extra poison, and hopefully once and for all.
It is, in some ways, a very exciting time to be a cancer patient. Cancer is already not what it used to be, and even for my extremely lethal one I was happy to discover last year that a late-stage diagnosis did not automatically mean a death sentence—at least not right away. But it is also terrifying. Every patient is in a race with the science to hang on long enough to benefit from the fruit of these discoveries. Someday we may all be saved, but will our own rescue come in time?
And now, here in 2025, it is even more terrifying. Because while on the one hand we stand on the precipice of finally being able to tame this monster, we have the US government making the affirmative choice to let the cancer win.
The cuts in funding closing labs may be closing down the very science that was going to save the person you know and love. The hysteria maligning vaccines moreover threatens to close down some of the most promising avenues for delivering real cures. Meanwhile a politicized FDA stands to slow approvals for new trials and treatments. And a CDC that no longer can be trusted to control disease only gives aid and comfort to the pathogens that would seek to ultimately kill us all.
And for women’s cancers in particular, a politicized public health system that deems the specific science of our bodies to be icky and criminal deprives us of all sorts of avenues for treatment and cures. There is evidence, for instance, that abortifacients like mifepristone can defeat the mechanism that makes our ovarian cancers so resistant to treatment, because it may be the same mechanism that protects pregnancies that is now misfiring to protect our tumor cells. And yet, there is currently little science exploring this vector of opportunity because how can there be? That science is all but illegal. As nearly all science is now becoming.
Mankind has made enormous strides in understanding the science of the human body, down to an even molecular level. We increasingly understand how to maintain the health of these amazing walking chemistry sets that somehow manage to spark into souls. And yet this government would damn us back to the days when all we had were leeches and deity beseeches, thanks to a hostility to science that is a hostility to life itself. The gift civilization has given us, of being able to control our own medical destiny, has been cast aside by this government. And it means that people will die—needlessly, avoidably, and heartbreakingly.
No claim of controlling “waste” could possibly justify what the Trump Administration has done. The true waste is measured not just in lost science and aborted research but in the lives that will be needlessly lost with it, including the lives of everyone who could be using their own lifeforce to make this world better if they weren’t having to succumb to diseases we are capable of abating. The cost of these policy decisions far, far exceeds any supposed “savings” these misanthropic policies pretend to offer. There is absolutely nothing of value that these cretinous, gleefully ignorant anti-science policies could possibly hope to gain, and there is so much hope to be lost if they are not soon reversed so that we can once again have the world class public health system that we first met the 21st century with.
If they are not, and soon, I fear my own life will be doomed. And so will we be all.
It’s fascinating how quickly the tune changes when the shoe’s on the other foot. For years, we’ve been treated to endless screaming about how any effort to identify and counter foreign manipulation on social media was “censorship” and a violation of Americans’ free speech rights. The same crowd that turned researchers into pariahs and shut down entire government offices dedicated to studying foreign influence operations are now… demanding that social media platforms identify foreign accounts?
Laura Loomer, ever the consistent voice of reason, recently posted on X:
After this week, I would like to see X put country tags on X accounts so we know which country someone is tweeting from.
Too many foreigners on X pretending to be Americans for the sake of creating discord and political violence in the US.
It’s totally out of control.
This is the same Laura Loomer who has spent years railing against any kind of trust & safety interventions as “censorship.” But now that foreign accounts might be saying things she doesn’t like, suddenly identifying foreign influence is a great idea?
Loomer’s demand perfectly encapsulates the broader MAGA approach to foreign influence operations: destroy the systems that actually work, then demand magic solutions when the problem inevitably resurfaces. And, of course, this is leaving out the basic things that anyone with an ounce of knowledge about countering foreign misinformation could tell you including (1) foreign misinfo peddlers tend not to appear in a way that lets platforms know where they’re posting from, and (2) even if they did, they’d immediately switch to VPNs or other methods of cloaking their location soon after.
With MAGA folks in control of all aspects of the government, it was no surprise that they quickly shuttered the Global Engagement Center (GEC) with a bunch of nonsense about how it was against free speech. This ignored the reality, which was that it was created and focused on helping to suss out foreign influence campaigns and to expose them to limit their power.
You know, just like Laura Loomer is now asking to have happen.
Somewhat incredibly, just days after Loomer demanded efforts to identify foreign interference on social media, Marco Rubio’s State Department gleefully announced that the US had withdrawn from an international effort designed to help expose foreign influence campaigns that had been used for years to help expose things like secret ISIS social media campaigns.
Even as the MAGA world is now clamoring for efforts to help expose foreign influence campaigns, they’re still framing efforts that were going on before as… censorship. Here was Marco Rubio lying about the GEC:
Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving. This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.
That ends today. Under the administration of President Trump, we will always work to protect the rights of the American people, and this is an important step in continuing to fulfill that commitment.
This is simply, fundamentally untrue. GEC did not work on silencing or censoring Americans. It worked on helping to expose and counter foreign influence campaigns.
As did many trust & safety and integrity teams across the industry, many of which have been dismantled by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, despite their efforts to expose and limit malicious foreign actors. But because of a bad faith campaign (led by MAGA and MAGA-adjacent people) to paint all trust & safety and efforts to counter disinformation as “censorship” now we’re left in a space where the people who were good at exposing these campaigns are gone… but you have people like Loomer demanding that Elon Musk magically do what he’s spent the last couple of years making sure X could no longer do.
This isn’t just run-of-the-mill political hypocrisy. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what foreign influence operations actually look like and how they work.
So now we have the same political coalition that cheered the dismantling of foreign influence research suddenly very concerned about… foreign influence. It’s almost like they never actually cared about the principle of free speech, but rather about ensuring that the speech they liked wasn’t subject to any scrutiny.
Of course, now, the systems and infrastructure that could actually identify foreign manipulation campaigns in a sophisticated way require exactly the kind of research infrastructure that people like Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee spent months attacking. The very people that Jordan and friends called the “censorship cartel” (something they never were) are exactly the folks that actually have expertise in finding foreign disinfo campaigns.
We’re left with what we’ve got: Loomer demanding that Elon Musk implement some kind of country-of-origin tagging system, apparently unaware that such systems are incredibly easy to circumvent with VPNs, and that building effective counter-measures requires exactly the kind of sustained research and institutional knowledge that her political allies just spent years dismantling.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t spend years screaming that any effort to study foreign manipulation is “censorship” and then turn around and demand that platforms magically solve the foreign manipulation problem. Well, you can, but it makes you look like either a hypocrite or someone who never understood the issue in the first place.
The truth is, dealing with foreign influence operations is genuinely difficult and requires nuanced approaches that balance free speech concerns with the need to maintain the integrity of public discourse. It requires sustained research, institutional knowledge, and yes, sometimes it means that platforms need to make difficult decisions about what content to host and how to label it.
But instead of having that conversation, we got years of performative outrage about “censorship” that effectively neutered our ability to deal with foreign manipulation. And now, when the consequences of that approach become apparent, the same people who created this mess are demanding quick fixes.
Of course, now we’ll probably have to sit through years of these same people “discovering” every other aspect of content moderation and foreign influence operations as if they’re the first ones to think of it.
And it appears to be getting worse as Musk (and other companies, like Amazon) launch more LEO satellites. A new study (hat tip, Gizmodo) found that all of the launched satellites exceed brightness limits established by the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), harming scientists’ ability to conduct scientific research:
“Although there are no official regulations in place, the CPS established recommendations for maximum acceptable brightness for satellites orbiting below 341 miles (550 kilometers). The IAU established a maximum brightness of +7 magnitude for professional astronomy and below +6 magnitude as the aesthetic reference so it does not impact the public’s ability to stargaze without interference from satellites.”
Again, it’s worth reiterating that Musk initially stated this would never be a problem. While the study found that the brightness levels of Starlink satellites have improved some, the lower orbiting altitude of some of the newer Starlink satellites means the brightness impact is actually worse.
Despite Musk’s endless whining about “burdensome regulations,” the U.S. doesn’t really regulate this sort of thing. And the damage goes well beyond astronomy.
Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that could undermine the progress we’ve made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, an increase of 646% over natural levels.
Starlink’s about to get a big boost by taxpayers, too. Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill to redirect billions in subsidies to Elon Musk and Starlink, despite the service’s high costs, congestion problems, and increasingly problematic environmental impact. And, of course, Starlink is just one of several emerging competitors in the LEO space, all jockeying for a huge boost in taxpayer subsidies.
Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.
McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.
As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.
For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.
He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.
In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”
Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”
As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.
Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”
But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.
“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”
McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.
It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?
The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.
Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.
McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.
Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.
The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.
McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)
Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.
Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certainpesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.
Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.
At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.
One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.
In 2023, they set about finding out.
They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.
Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiplestudies have linked toautism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditionscontributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.
The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.
Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.
The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”
Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.
“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”
Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.
With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.
While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”
Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”
If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.
McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.
McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.
The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.
McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.
She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.
The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”
Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.
We recently talked about Donald Trump’s foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take for someone who seems to care so deeply about genetics in other areas, but Donald Trump being an inconsistent mess is not remotely newsworthy. The comments were made during a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) event that unveiled RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” MAHA report on American health. That report, which RFK Jr. touted as a result of “gold standard” science, identified four major causes of deficiencies in health in America.
The MAHA Commission event unveiled the group’s new report, which pointed to four key factors it says are hurting U.S. children: ultraprocessed foods, environmental chemicals, digital behavior and “overmedicalization.” The report identifies pesticides and other chemicals as potentially having harmful health impacts, but it stops short of recommending actions to limit them.
And, hey, I can get on board with some of that. Though I’ve made a habit of righteously slapping around Kennedy and his HHS Department as of late, not every idea the man has is completely stupid. Do ultra-processed foods probably suck for our health? I can imagine that being the case. Chemicals in our environment and/or food? Sure, that sounds like something worth studying. Digital behavior issues and the vague reference to “overmedicalization” have my spidey-sense tingling, I will admit, but neither strike me as particularly unworthy of attention at first glance.
But the problem is that when you tout your report as “gold standard” medicine and then I later learn that this report’s citations read like an AI hallucination, well, now I have to question everything once more.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.
Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.
The post over at NOTUS goes into details. The broken links are probably just a result of human error, I suppose. The misinterpretations of other studies could be the result of, well, flat incompetence. But the studies and citations within specific papers and journals that don’t appear to exist? Someone is either flat out lying in this report, or else it was constructed with the help of AI. It’s not like we haven’t seen that sort of thing in the academic and legal realms before.
Katherine Keyes is one author of a supposed study the MAHA report referenced.
Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
It’s not clear that anyone wrote the study cited in the MAHA report. The citation refers to a study titled, “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” along with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, that issue didn’t include a study with that title.
Again, I cannot say for sure that AI was used in this report, but it has all the hallmarks of your typical AI hallucination, where it attempts to build a plausible response to a prompt based on whatever datapoints it can find on the internet. For instance, Keyes does study topics such as in the fictional citation. And Keyes has in fact published work within JAMA Pediatrics. But the specifics here appear to be completely fabricated.
She’s not alone.
A section describing the “corporate capture of media” highlights two studies that it says are “broadly illustrative” of how a rise in direct-to-consumer drug advertisements has led to more prescriptions being written for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids.
Those articles don’t appear in the table of contents for the journals listed in their citations. A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, where psychiatric researcher Robert L. Findling currently teaches, confirmed to NOTUS that he never authored such an article. The author of the first study doesn’t appear to be a real ADHD researcher at all — at least, not one with a Google Scholar profile.
In another section titled, “American Children are on Too Much Medicine – A Recent and Emerging Crisis,” the report claims that 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. But searching Google for the exact title of the paper it cites to back up that figure — “Overprescribing of oral corticosteroids for children with asthma” — leads to only one result: the MAHA report.
There is more, with cited authors confirming to NOTUS that they never authored the studies or articles in other citations. In other cases, the report simply takes small, targeted studies and broadens them to become nationwide evidence of the very theories Kennedy has been pushing for years and years.
Can we confirm for sure that someone, or multiple someones, used generative AI to produce this report? No, we can’t, but I say that with as much of a literary wink as I can muster through the written word.
But even if that ends up not being the case, a report full of fictionalized and misinterpreted scientific studies is many things, but it sure as shit is not “gold standard science.”
The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just… helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not “they won’t let me tweet slurs” censorship, but literal “we’re going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship” censorship.
It’s painfully stupid, but that’s just what we get with the folks running the government these days.
This all starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the belief that any research into “disinformation” must itself be a censorship program. This is a bit like assuming that studying cancer is actually a plot to give people cancer, but this is the state of the crazy world we live in today. It ignores the rather obvious fact that disinformation and foreign influence campaigns do exist, and that studying them usually aims to counter them with more speech, not less.
But you will never get that through to the truly brain-wormed among the MAGA-Musk cinematic universe. Just recently, Elon announced that “several more censorship organizations will be released” after a Steve Bannon acolyte falsely posted to ExTwitter that USAID’s non-classified efforts to fund digital literacy efforts was about censorship (she claimed the programs were “declassified,” as she’s too ignorant to know that the “U” in the description means they were always unclassified).
Of course, digital literacy has nothing to do with “censorship” at all. It’s not about “getting news solely from legacy sources.” It simply is about teaching people how to understand what they’re reading (like knowing when something is unclassified already, rather than declassified) and understanding how to recognize when you’re being lied to.
Either way, in pursuit of dumbing down Americans and making them much more susceptible to foreign influence campaigns, last week the NSF got around to pulling a bunch of grants that were (often loosely) related to mis- and disinformation. NSF put out a statement claiming these cuts are about better aligning their efforts.
Awards that are not aligned with NSF’s priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation.
While the targeting of DEI initiatives has received significant attention, the wholesale elimination of mis- and disinformation research represents an equally concerning development.
While apparently 430 such grants have been unceremoniously canceled, one academic forwarded me a spreadsheet listing out about 50 such canceled grants. I don’t want to release the whole thing, but while NSF’s email to academics claimed that each cut was carefully vetted, that’s obviously bullshit.
The most obvious example of how haphazard and stupid these cuts are is that they cut Associate Professor Eric Wustrow’s CAREER grant on “Combating Censorship from Within the Network.” You can kinda tell that some DOGE bro likely did a keyword search on “censorship” and probably just killed all such projects. But if anyone actually read even just the description of the project, they’d realize that this was about countering censorship through technology. You’d think that’s the sort of thing that the DOGE folks would support? Unless of course, they actually support censorship. (Also, canceling CAREER grants is utter bullshit, as they’re specifically designed to help out early career professors, who will be massively harmed by this).
Other canceled grants include one on “empowering fact checkers” because we can’t have that. There’s a canceled grant about “enhancing attribution, detection, and explanation” of foreign influence campaigns (you can see why MAGA might not like that one very much). Also a program on “using markets to address manipulated information online.” You’d think that the “more speech” crew would like that sorta thing, but apparently not.
The impact of these cuts will be profound: reducing America’s ability to counter actual censorship, understand foreign influence operations, and maintain technological leadership in these critical areas.
“I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership,” writes Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn’t give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency’s $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.
As Science notes, DOGE showed up in the NSF offices a few weeks ago and basically just started slashing stuff without much concern or understanding. And Panchanathan gives a little nod towards that nonsense in his resignation letter:
Panchanathan refers obliquely to that draconian reduction in his resignation letter. “While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he writes, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”
This is, like so much from this administration, needless destruction of important American infrastructure and knowledge base through ignorance, anger and stupidity. We will all be worse for it, but thank goodness, no one will ever have to face being… digitally literate in the Trump universe.
The first few months of the Trump administration have seen a quick divergence between those who are quick to bend the knee to unconstitutional, authoritarian, censorial demands from Donald Trump, and those with the spine to actually stand up and say “fuck that.”
While it’s important to call out and shame those who cave, it’s equally crucial to highlight institutions willing to take a principled stand. What’s unfolding now at Harvard isn’t just about one university’s funding or academic policies — it’s a critical test case for whether America’s institutions can withstand direct governmental attempts to control speech and thought. The precedent being set will determine whether universities remain independent centers of learning and research, or become extensions of whatever administration holds power. This week, Harvard University has demonstrated what institutional courage looks like in the face of escalating threats from the Trump administration.
Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and the independence of private entities continues apace. The administration has been on something of an authoritarian tour across the country, spanning multiple verticals, in which the main goal appears to simply be to exert as much power as possible, breaking both norms and institutional safeguards with wild abandon.
Trump and his cadre of minions have been playing language games all along in this endeavor, attempting to redefine free speech as only applicable to speech Trump likes, exposing journalists and their sources to danger, punishing university students for exercising their speech rights, and coercing law firms into “good behavior” by withholding security clearances if the firms have or do take any actions the administration doesn’t like.
It’s hard to overstate just how wildly dangerous this all is, nor how infuriating it is to watch so many of these victims bend the knee rather than fight what is undeniably a battle worth waging. What’s at stake is nothing less than the independence of American institutions. The administration is currently using federal education and research grants like the sword of Damocles, insisting that schools fall in line or risk losing government money that powers all kinds of valuable, important research. But as Columbia University recently learned, there is never a “last ask” from a strongman and the sword never rises beyond an inch from the neck. Giving in only propels the next demand. And then the next. And the next.
The Trump administration recently made all kinds of demands of Harvard, a bizarre mix of demands to end diversity in some places, but mandate it in others, while making other demands that would essentially amount to the school caving to Trump. The demands represent an unprecedented level of government interference in a private institution. No more DEI initiatives for admissions or hiring. A requirement that data over such things be shared out freely with the federal government. Punishment for any students or groups deemed by the government to be “antisemitic.” And a overhaul of international admissions such that candidates are to be screened out if they have any “anti-American” viewpoints.
Except then the government also demands a very specific form of DEI: diverse viewpoints in all programs and departments.
After having presented Harvard’s existing diversity efforts as the antithesis of a merit-based approach, it suddenly demands that the university enforce what it terms viewpoint diversity. It never defines what this term means—perhaps alchemy in the chemistry department?But the implications are that it amounts to affirmative action for conservatives. Harvard is directed to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Any department that fails the audit would be required to start hiring new faculty until it can pass the undefined standards demanded by the feds.
Here again, we see the hypocrisy of the strongman on display. Diversity of thought when it comes to Israel? Banished! Diversity of thought on America’s actions and values? Verboten! Diversity of backgrounds within the student body and faculty itself? Nothing could be worse!
But there must be a quota carved out for the kind of thought that the government prefers or there will be punishment. Were we to need a perfect example of thought-policing in the modern era, it appears we have it.
Even entertaining such demands would amount to the takeover of a private educational institution by the federal government. And the research funding that the government is withholding isn’t for pet projects in niche circles. It’s funding for medical breakthroughs, for improving the lives of children. For technology advances that could improve the lives of Americans generally. That’s important, so please understand: the withholding of these federal funds from Harvard isn’t merely a punishment for Harvard, but a punishment for all of us.
Which is exactly what is happening, as the government has frozen billions in funds because Harvard has refused to bow at the altar of Donald Trump.
The university has decided these demands force it to fight, and it’s attacking on two fronts. The first is public-facing; Harvard has turned itshomepageinto a tribute to its researchers and the work they pursue. Although it starts with a huge banner article as shown here, links to 30 individual articles on research fill the entire page. I have a fairly high-resolution screen, and it took hitting page-down nine times to finally reach the bottom, where a handful of links to the rest of the university finally appear. The message is clear: The research that’s under threat matters, and humanity will be worse off if its funding is cut.
Separately, Harvard’slegal response, which it made public today, is basically: nope. After detailing the steps the university has already taken to address antisemitism, it gets to the crux of the issue: “your letter disregards Harvard’s efforts and instead presents demands that, in contravention of the First Amendment, invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.” The harms these demands are meant to address, the letter alleges, haven’t actually been demonstrated through processes that are required by law.
Even more direct is the letter Harvard’s President, Alan Garber, sent to the Harvard community:
We have informed the administration through our legal counsel thatwe will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.
The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.
This is a battle worth waging. Columbia’s funding is still on hold, despite its attempts at appeasement. I have no doubt the same would be true if Harvard attempted to do likewise. There will end up being a court battle over this, no doubt. One that will hopefully rise to the level of the Supreme Court and will surface an argument over how and why the Executive Administration should be able to hold for ransom funds allocated by Congress over the demand for the erasure of institutional independence.
The contrast between Columbia and Harvard couldn’t be clearer. As Columbia has shown, if you cave, Trump will still demand more and withhold funds. If you fight, you might still lose, but at least you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you did the right thing. Plus, it’s contagious. While Columbia quickly caved to Trump’s demands, we’re seeing other universities stand up as well.
Princeton has indicated that it won’t fold. Cornell has sued the Department of Energy over the $1 billion in frozen grants. Stanford’s leadership has expressed support for Harvard as well. Fighting back is contagious and the right thing to do, both for the fundamental academic freedoms that these institutions of higher learning supposedly support, and to show a fascist bully that you won’t comply in advance.
It won’t be easy. Indeed, since Harvard’s pushback on Monday, Trump has made the $2.3 billion funding freeze official, effectively admitting that he is punishing the university for its free expression (which I’m sure will be useful in court). Trump is also musing about removing Harvard’s non-profit tax-exempt status:
That’s Donald Trump posting to his personal social media site:
Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!
Some of us remember when it was a huge scandal — perhaps one of the biggest of all time — when the IRS under Obama investigated a few conservative non-profits to make sure they were obeying the law. I also remember how under the first Trump administration, the IRS was made to apologize to those non-profits and agreed to settle the cases. Yet, here, the very same Trump admin is just nakedly threatening to pull tax exempt status solely on the basis of not kissing up to Trump and his unconstitutional demands.
Equally, some of us also remember the misleading claims during previous administrations about the supposed lack of “free speech” on college campuses and will note how silent those who were screaming the loudest about that are now that Trump is just going door to door from university to university demanding the suppression of speech and punishing universities that oppose him.
This is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the concept of higher learning. It is an attack on the concept of free speech and academic freedom. It is an attack on the important research that universities do that have bettered the lives of millions. It is an attack on American ideals.
Harvard’s stand represents something profound: institutions with resources, prestige, and power using those advantages to protect fundamental principles rather than themselves. In doing so, they remind us what genuine institutional courage looks like. While the courts will eventually weigh in, the immediate battle is being fought in the court of public opinion, where each institution’s response signals to others what’s possible. The cascade of universities now following Harvard’s lead suggests that principled stands — not capitulation — may become the new normal. So, kudos to Harvard and Princeton and Cornell, for doing what Columbia couldn’t be bothered to do. Hopefully more institutions of higher learning take the right lesson from this and recognize now is not the time to fold, but to stand up and do what’s right.
Last month a BBC study found that “AI” assistants are terrible at providing accurate news synopses. The BBC’s study found that modern language learning model assistants introduced factual errors a whopping 51 percent of the time. 19 percent of the responses introduced factually inaccurate “statements, numbers and dates,” and 13 percent either altered subject quotes or made up quotes entirely.
This month a study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that modern “AI” is also terrible at accurate citations. Researchers asked most modern “AI” chatbots basic questions about news articles and found that they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries.
It should be noted they weren’t making particularly onerous demands or asking the chatbots to interpret anything. Researchers randomly selected ten articles from each publisher, then asked chatbot from various major companies to identify the corresponding article’s headline, original publisher, publication date, and URL. They ran sixteen hundred queries across eight major chatbots.
Some AI assistants, like Elon Musk’s Grok, were particularly awful, providing incorrect answers to 94 percent of the queries about news articles. Researchers also amusingly found that premium chatbots were routinely more confident in the false answers they provided:
“This contradiction stems primarily from their tendency to provide definitive, but wrong, answers rather than declining to answer the question directly. The fundamental concern extends beyond the chatbots’ factual errors to their authoritative conversational tone, which can make it difficult for users to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate information. “
The study also found that most major chatbots either failed to include accurate citations to the information they were using, or provided inaccurate citations a huge portion of the time:
“The generative search tools we tested had a common tendency to cite the wrong article. For instance, DeepSeek misattributed the source of the excerpts provided in our queries 115 out of 200 times. This means that news publishers’ content was most often being credited to the wrong source.”
That’s not to say that automation doesn’t have its uses, or that it won’t improve over time. But again, this level of clumsy errors is not what the public is being sold by these companies. Giant companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Elon Musk’ Nazi Emporium have sold AI as just a few quick breaths and another few billion away from amazing levels of sentience, yet they can’t perform rudimentary tasks.
Companies are rushing undercooked product to market and overselling its real-world capabilities to make money. Other companies in media are then rushing to adopt this undercooked automation not to improve journalism quality or worker efficiency, but to cut corners, save money, undermine labor, and, in the case of outlets like the LA Times, to entrench and normalize the bias of affluent ownership.
I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it’s at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It’s something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it has to do with a combination of intellectual curiosity and trust.
I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof moment over the weekend, when I heard variations on the same phrase twice, in two completely unrelated contexts. The first was in an MSNBC article by former Twitter employee Eddie Perez talking about how little Elon Musk understands how elections work. He started out his piece with this phrase:
Here’s a timeless dictum that aptly applies to election administration: Everything looks suspicious when you don’t know how anything works.
There are some really good points in Perez’s article, including this tidbit:
Perhaps Musk’s most bizarre argument came when he argued U.S. elections are vulnerable due to a lack of paper ballots. “The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” he told the audience.This was a very strange comment from a businessman who is pitching automated driverless robotaxis and robovans that depend on computer-driven artificial intelligence to protect human lives, as well as computer-driven rockets that hope to extend human civilization through the colonization of Mars.
I’m certainly sensitive to questions around electronic voting, as someone who spent many of the early years of this blog calling out sketchy electronic voting schemes. However, really over the last decade, there have been vast improvements in the security and process behind electronic voting, such that most such systems now include important safety valves and backstops, including voter-verified paper trails and risk-limiting audits. Not every state has those systems yet (even though they should!) but calling for such things is very, very different from saying that all electronic voting is untrustworthy.
But, by now it’s clear that if anyone lacks intellectual curiosity to understand reality, it’s Elon Musk. After all, he’s not only (falsely) trashing electronic voting, but he’s also been trashing mail-in ballots (which he calls “insane”), even as his own Super PAC is pushing people to vote early by mail. Oh, and also, Elon himself has regularly voted by mail.
But, back to that statement. The same day I read Eddie’s piece, I also saw the recent Hank Green video in which he talks about how he received his election ballot in Montana, and at first worried that something nefarious was underfoot. On his ballot, he noticed that in every category, the Democrat was listed last on the ballot, and he wondered if it was an attempt to sway votes (there is some science suggesting that people lower on a ballot get fewer votes).
However, Hank (unlike Elon) didn’t just run with his hunch. He investigated things and found that his worry was not valid. Montana “randomizes” the ballots by starting in alphabetical order by candidates, but then rotating the candidates down one on different ballots, so that each candidate appears on the bottom and the top of the list an equal amount of times.
In other words, election officials in Montana do something right, even if seeing just the one bit of info caused Hank to worry they might have done something wrong. Hank calls out a (more popular) variation on the quote that Eddie uses above, citing the saying:
“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.”
I like that formulation even better. But, as Hank points out, this saying is a bit too mean and inaccurate. A more accurate version would be:
“Everything is a conspiracy theory whenyou don’t trust anything.”
I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.
Elon Musk, somewhat incredibly, seems to lack the basic intellectual curiosity to ever try to seek out why something is the way it is. He always assumes he can somehow “reason from first principles” as to why things are the way they are. This makes him ever more susceptible to the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories around. He’s constructed for himself a media environment mostly designed to reinforce those biases, rather than challenge them.
In the long run, I’d say folks are better off being more like Hank Green (intellectually curious, willing to seek out information and be proven wrong) and less like Elon Musk (intellectually uncurious, willing to believe utter nonsense so long as it reinforces your priors).
