your science briefing for 05.08.2025

How authoritarian governments create malevolent, selfish people, reaching the limits of generative AI, the enormous costs of crypto mining quantified, and more ...

Ever since peak COVID, one of the most common observations that I’ve heard echoed online and off is that people have become far less conscientious, more selfish, louder, almost as if they don’t know how to behave in public anymore, or care. Likewise, their lack of empathy, greed, and narcissism seems to have shot up through the roof. Turns out that it may actually be linked with the country’s slide down the political spectrum towards authoritarianism. After surveying almost a quarter million subjects from some 75 countries, researchers found higher prevalences of malevolent personality types in authoritarian nations. With little trust in fairness, equity, justice, people can turn selfish and manipulative as an almost animalistic survival mechanism… (PsyPost)

Generative AI models are getting larger and more complex. And yet, according to the latest reports, their hallucinations have gotten worse and worse. This is actually more or less in line with what should be expected because at some point, models begin to lose their fidelity. There are too many connections, parameters, and feedback loops to maintain high levels of accuracy in throw-in-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink models without overtraining them so much, their responses turn into the equivalent of if-then-else chains. Does this mean generative AI is over? No. But it does mean we’re hitting their limits and need new architectures to push them further… (NYT)

While RFK Jr., the science-denying head of public medical research and noted hater of vaccines and germ theory, declares war on autism in ways that are chillingly and noxiously reminiscent of very literal Nazi rhetoric and tactics, scientists are aghast as their research into the causes and the recent rise in autism diagnoses is certain to be weaponized against autistic people. You see, they are also concerned about just how many kids and adults are being diagnosed, both proactively or retroactively, worried that ASD is becoming an umbrella term for other difficult to diagnose disorders that need more attention and research. Now, they’re concerned that their work will either be thrown away or misused in grievous ways by a malicious idiot… (Transmitter)

One of the trademark features of neurodegenerative diseases are incorrectly folded tau proteins. A byproduct of regulatory glial cell activity, they are usually flushed out of the brain by rest and sleep, but when they become malformed in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, they tend to clump in the brain. Why? We’re not entirely sure, but to find out, scientists created a synthetic tau prion that folds incorrectly similarly to what we see in patients’ brains. The plan is to use them to simulate how the disease unfolds, how the proteins get misshapen, and potentially why. One of the insights we already have is that the tau prions change how the water around them behaves on a molecular level. Hopefully there will be more insights to come… (ScienceAlert)

Bitcoin and its offshoots were the darlings of anarchists, libertarians, and sovereign citizens, powering their attempts to organize into anti-government communities and earn a lot of money by selling crypto advice and getting in on the ground floor of new coins, scams or not. But the coin has been losing its luster as mining it may no longer be worth it, the primary reason for that being the massive power demands which are diverting enough electricity to power the country of Poland for magic internet money. According to a new study of 34 of the biggest bitcoin mines the in the U.S. alone was the equivalent of adding the pollution and consumption of one and a third LA metro areas to the power grid with highly questionable returns… (IEEE)