your science briefing for 04.15.2025

The startup which insists their AIs are sort of alive, another attack on vaccination is coming in September, why people are giving up on having kids, and more...

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, or came over from the old blog, then you already know how I feel about AI companies’ grandiose claims as someone also in the tech field. There’s a bizarre reverence and wishful thinking in the industry which is turning very large, fallible, and limited machines from helpful tools into objects of near worship in service of a dystopian agenda. And in few places is this more true than in a new startup created by OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who claims we’re very close to a Ghost in the Shell future… (Futurism)

Our Plaguemaster-in-Chief and Secretary of Disease and Inhuman Services, RFK Jr. is raising scientists’ and doctors’ eyebrows by claiming that we’ll know the true cause of autism by September. This is alarming for two reasons. First, is that we’re pretty sure that autism is largely genetic after decades of research. Secondly, this is not how any legitimate scientific inquiry works. You discover things when you discover them rather than hand the universe a schedule of KPIs to meet. But given that he hired a notorious anti-vaccine crank and put him in charge of this “research,” I’m pretty sure I know why he’s so confident about this timeline… (Newsweek)

What happens when you make it more and more difficult and expensive to have kids, raise them, and make sure they’ll have a good future, all while telling generations that if they can’t afford children, they shouldn’t have any? They give up. Despite oligarchs and plutocrats demanding that we breed dammit, and dreaming of a future where the human population is so large, we have no choice but to colonize the solar system, real people who are really struggling and losing hope are just deciding that being parents is not for them and see no reason to change their minds as the population is projected to start falling in less than five years… (MSU)

A new, infinitely frustrating archetype just dropped into public discourse over the last year and a half or so. It’s the person, usually a young Gen Zer who doesn’t follow any politics or news, yet will recite every right wing conspiracy theory and political talking point by heart at the first opportunity. Where are the getting this? According to recent surveys, Joe Rogan and Barstool Sports. Between a quarter to a third of Gen Z Trump voters listen to these podcasts at least once a month and do not seem to think they’re inherently political leaning in any specific way, and yet… (Axios)

There’s been a lot of debate about how to deal with disinformation on social media, as well as how it really spreads. It sounds like we’re still scrambling, even after nearly two decades of increasingly corrosive, omnipresent social platforms invading our daily life, but researchers are starting to reach consensus on key issues. First, disinformation is a top down problem instead of a bottom up one. Second, labeling posts as hoaxes or lies does indeed work, halting their potential virality… (ScienceAlert)