RFK Jr's 'Maha' report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies
85 comments
·May 30, 2025justacrow
OscarTheGrinch
At a certain point all public communication will just be AIs making content for other AIs, and we can humans can assend to just talking to eachother again.
TudorAndrei
Whenever I think about AI in comms. I always go back to this video
(NSFW - language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcHc54Z_b3w
hellotheretoday
A lot of times when I ask chatgpt for references on something it sends me dead links or links to something that do not have anything to do with what it claims to be citing. I point that out and then it sends me more of the same. I would not be surprised if they were already working on this to improve that aspect to convince people who actually bother to check sources. I also wonder how many people don’t bother to check and are convinced of its potentially flawed perspectives simply because it delivers some citations that are completely irrelevant
It reminds me of a time I met some kook who was arguing the merits of this dumb bullshit they bought off instagram. It was $800 and claimed to cure anxiety with magnetic power. They sent a word document provided by the company and it was just a bunch of random studies about transcranial direct current stimulation, which is a real thing with some evidence, but was completely unrelated and is based on electrical currents and not magnetic woo woo bullshit.
sshine
That's very backwards. When I ask Kagi's Assistant for references, it provides the search queries that it crawled before answering. That behavior is independent of what LLM is being used, but the reference output format may vary depending on the LLM.
pjc50
The current situation is "The Triumph of the Woo" (Riefenstahl passim). There's a lot of such people, they vote, and their money has ended up in an industry which makes donations to ensure that it can continue to scam people.
ChrisMarshallNY
They could call it “MyFacts” (Doonesbury reference).
r721
Previous discussions:
thrance
Why was the first one flagged? I swear, it's way too easy for truth-hating fascists to kill important subjects on this site.
dcminter
Probably because this is an obviously hot political topic, not new, and something that will indeed be sufficiently mainstream to be (heavily) covered in the usual news channels. Whereas the guidelines explicitly state:
> "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
This story will just attract the usual partisan posturing and is very unlikely to bring any really interesting high value conversations.
luke-stanley
The Guardian article is a new analysis about unchecked AI technology use by a government health official claiming to support science. Surely that’s HN-worthy, not off-topic? Is it fair to assume any element of politics involvement will be low-value or against the guidelines?
JeremyNT
> Probably because this is an obviously hot political topic, not new, and something that will indeed be sufficiently mainstream to be (heavily) covered in the usual news channels.
I submit that prominent US government agencies generating bogus propagandistic scientific papers to justify its policies is, in fact, new.
Scarblac
It's very easy to accidentally click flag instead of the title (on mobile anyway), I hope it doesn't immediately do something serious.
thrance
You can always unflag them if you go to your profile and see the list of flagged submissions. But anyway, these type of links get flagged uniquely often, I think it has nothing to do with bad UI. And in my experience, it didn't use to be this way.
csomar
Some flagging transparency has to be implemented a la lobste.rs and also mod boosting or demotion. This really hurts HN reputation when it comes to neutrality.
nathanaldensr
Neutrality has nothing to do with it. HN should not be for political discourse; therefore, neutrality is orthogonal to the site's character. Many of us agree, hence the flags.
pjc50
Lot of people flag anything political, and there's still a lot of Trump supporters with the flag power reading HN.
nathanaldensr
HN shouldn't be for political discourse of any kind. The kind that tends to get upvoted despite clearly breaking the site's rules is nearly entirely leftist in nature; therefore, you're only going to see leftist stories flagged. I flag all political hot-button stories, whether left or right. Leave that crap on Reddit where it belongs. Just because we flaggers rarely comment (because doing so just makes us lose karma due to raging users) doesn't mean we don't exist.
zombot
> He outlined plans for creating government-run journals instead.
There once was a time when we fought an entire Cold War to stop ideas like that.
sillyfluke
Did we though?
The triangle design for the stealth plane (I'm not arguing the merits of the design or the plane) to come out Skunkworks came from a radar paper from a Soviet journal -- at least according to book on the topic. As I recall from the book, the Soviet author of the paper, who emigrated to the States in the 90s (?), said he wasn't too surprised that it was the States and not the Soviets who took his paper seriously.
And here we are revoking visas of international students.
This tells me that in a couple iterations down the road the MAGA admin is not going to take its own government journals seriously either.
philistine
You cannot actually believe that a triangle shape for a stealth plane is a novel idea that warrants reducing the work of the cold war era US?
What other shape would it have had? Square?
sillyfluke
I'll quote the story, since you don't want to google it:
>> While Overholser himself described Ufimtsev’s work as, “so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd’s nerd would have waded through it,” he quickly recognized that a creative interpretation of the book could offer a means by which one could calculate how electromagnetic energy would reflect off of a two-dimensional shape.
Overholser then reasoned that if they could break down the design of an aircraft into a collection of two-dimensional triangles, it could be possible to calculate an aircraft’s complete radar return without having to actually build it and stick it in front of a radar array for testing like Boeing’s Quiet Bird. <<
It was a book, not a journal paper apparently.
IAmBroom
By "we" do you mean the TLAs? Cuz all I did was hide under my desk when I saw bright flashes of light.
andy_ppp
How on Earth did the system being vandalised and dismantled by these morons ever come into being in the first place? It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude to processing information, be it conspiracy theories or healthcare or huge bot farms producing propaganda to divide us.
How can we go back to a more stable society once the truth has been systematically eroded? For example the white house press secretary said there would be no increase in the deficit yesterday, which is a complete lie. People now search for facts that prove their suspicions correct, not search out ideas that could change their default viewpoint. I really think a society without any truth is one doomed to failure.
kragen
> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude to processing information, (...) How can we go back to a more stable society once the truth has been systematically eroded?
Well, the last time this happened in the West, it was the conquest of Hellenistic civilization by the Romans, if we believe Lucio Russo's account. This was a gradual process that took centuries, but two notable events in it are the clear-cutting of Plato's Academy by Sulla in 86 BCE (whose soldiers also killed Archimedes) and the lynching of Hypatia by Christians in 415 CE. Western science didn't recover from that until somewhere between the 18th century, when Harrison solved latitude and Lavoisier began cataloging the elements, and 01966, when the Roman Catholic Church ceased to promulgate the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
Despite the Dark Ages in the West, science did continue elsewhere in the world, and even progress, but did not reach the general level of Hellenistic science and technology until it resurged in the West after the Renaissance, centuries after the Dark Ages ended. Many places had very stable societies—Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, Australian Aborigines—without it.
So, how can we go back? There's no guarantee we can. But we will go on.
Telemakhos
Archimedes died in 212, and Sulla wouldn’t be born until 138. Sulla tore down the physical building of Plato’s Academy, but the Academic skeptics (by Carneades’ day the Academy had devolved into skepticism) had much less to do with science in its modern form than, say, Aristotle’s empiricism.
The Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum was never a serious obstacle to publication outside the Papal States: most secular authorities outside the Italian peninsula disregarded it.
kragen
I appreciate the correction and amplifications. Archimedes was killed by a soldier of Marcellus, not Sulla.
For me the central problem of the Index was not so much its secular effects (though it is easier to find those than you say; the secular prohibition on teaching Descartes, for example) but that by its nature it proclaimed that ignorance was a moral virtue.
atentaten
Where can one find this account by Russo?
kayge
> if we believe Lucio Russo's account
Lucio = light/luminous
Russo = Russian
Looks like yet another disinformation attempt by the Russians, disregard!
;)
ManBeardPc
Many things lead to this. A society that gets fooled by clowns. Dehumanization of people from other groups. A system where the checks and balances are more of a convention rather than enforced and one part of the government has too much power to change the other ones. The two party system in general. A long ongoing process to erode democracy and trust in many institutions caused by forces from within and outside. The internet allowing everyone to find and organize with peers for even the most insane ideas, looking legitimate to outsiders because of group sizes we normally hardly see in person. And probably a dozen other reasons each being a tiny problem but resulting in a catastrophe together.
pjc50
> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude
It was never an agreement. It was more of a victory. One kind of science produced the nitrogen that fed the world; another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2; another produced the wonder drugs - the antibiotics etc - that allowed far more of the population to survive.
It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.
IAmBroom
> another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2;
Much of the credit for the victory goes to Stalin's USSR. Perhaps "not Nazi nor Japanese" would be more accurate.
> It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.
Always the path of progress, especially in science it seems. Darwinism takes over when the remaining Creationist biology teachers finally die, etc. It's possible that the 20th Century moved beyond this - Relativity and DNA caught on within a single generation.
AvAn12
Agreed. In addition to the great historical observations below, I notice the progression from “Data Science” to “AI.” Ideally, data sci should have been about applying the scientific method to analyzing data — which should have come down to 1. statistics, by another name and 2. A broader set of procedures which may improve upon classical stats, especially in cases where data doesn’t fit the assumptions of classical statistical procedures. AI, to me anyway, feels all about technology. The methods are built on sound theory and math but the AI products are black boxes, functionally similar to web browsers of course. Prompt engineering is a thing of course, but it feels like ad hoc tinkering, and inevitably leads to overfitting. And rigorous performance evaluation is left to qualitative vibe checking - unless of course you bring in extra tooling like Snorkel - but that’s not part of the core foundation model produce. Anyway, in sum, it feels like we had “science” in the picture for a few years there but it slipped through our fingers starting in 2022-ish
sofixa
> How on Earth did the system being vandalised and dismantled by these morons ever come into being in the first place?
The saddest part, IMO, is that 20-50% of the population see nothing wrong with all of this. Things will have to get a whole lot worse before there's a chance for them to get better.
lazyeye
[flagged]
lazyeye
[flagged]
pjc50
Large percentages of the population having a chronic disease is the success state. Because the alternative is them dying out of the population. This is especially true for diabetes, which became solvable in the 20th century.
npteljes
There are multiple arguments in your comment. If what you observe here is true, then those other arguments are what got the comment flagged.
LadyCailin
That’s because the argument is disingenuous at best, and straight up trolling at worst. No one believes the health industry is infallible. Not a single person. What reasonable people believe, is that the Trump administration is far worse at determining health policy. Electing Trump to fix the healthcare system is like blowing your and your neighbors foot off with a shotgun to scratch an itch on your toe. So, sorry if no one buys that argument, it’s completely asinine.
lostlogin
> The saddest part, IMO, is that 20-50% of the population see nothing wrong with all of this.
Give it a bit of time and we won’t be able to know this. Surveys are a bit too scientific. Process and standards are woke, leftist nonsense.
burnt-resistor
We need new leadership now because what's at risk is hundreds of millions of lives. The billionaires have their prepper bunkers and would be fine with the breakdown of civilization. It's the idiots, the corruption, and centralization of power that are meta existential risks that must be removed to ensure the survival of the species. And then address climate change, etc.
hoseyor
You’re calling people with legitimate but equally confused positions morons, while lamenting division.
Truth has been eroded for many decades now and you seem to assume that the lying and murderous government that keeps lying and murdering is the best arbiter and warden of truth through the public schools and systems it enforces to impose its narrative on the minds of the majority of people who are little more than flesh-bots called humans, programmed and flashed over tv and social media.
How could the truth even exist when free speech is under direct assault even in the country in which it is a core feature of the foundational order? Lies and manipulation are not the truth, it’s narcissistic manipulation. The truth cannot even be approached without free speech, free thought, whether you like it or not; because the inverse of free speech is control over your freedom to hear/see. Censorship not only suppresses the speech, it intentionally suppresses people hearing what psychopaths that control the government fear.
It’s basic narcissistic manipulative abuse patterns along with all the same manipulative patterns like manipulative language changes and gaslighting, dark patterns … but at least you can remember “you wouldn’t get beaten if you followed the constantly changing arbitrary rules of how you may or may not think, what you may or may not talk about, and how you have to say things”.
IAmBroom
You start by attacking the ad hominem of "morons", but then in the next sentence refer to those morons as "lying and murderous".
I agree that they are more likely liars than imbeciles, but stupidity is now praised openly by the US right wing. "I'm a maverick!" - a maverick is a useless horse that cannot be put to work. "Those ivy-league elitists" - a phrase actually used by ivy-league graduates to pretend they aren't well-educated.
hoseyor
You seem to be a symptom of the problem. I called the government lying and murderous because that is what it is, on account of all the lying and murdering, and I highlighted the hypocrisy of lamenting division while calling people moron, not something that leads to unity. They are categorically different matters.
What are you not comprehending, let’s work it out together.
mrtksn
So the spirit is right but the substance is BS? That's the architecture of everything populist. That's how you take on the elites, there's no case where the general population knows it better than the elites. It's a case of which elites went greedy or simply screwed up and people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. After all, is it not true that the people should take batter care of their health?
I've seen people blaming it on AI but IMHO that's not the culprit. Populists always had the "best" grasp of the problems and the simplest solutions that will "solve everything" since ever. Now they can have those AI generated but before AI they had anecdotal evidence, obscure work of someone that no one else can reproduce or some historical fact that everybody knows but its complete fabrication or misrepresentation.
j_w
How can the spirit be correct if the evidence backing the claims are non-existent?
We are talking about a guy who says American's are losing their faith in the establishment and science, yet does so using a paper with fabricated references. This is at best hypocrisy and negligence and at worst just more lies from the administration.
mrtksn
The the evidence on causes is wrong or non-existent. That doesn’t mean that there’s no evidence that Americans should get healthier because there’s plenty of evidence on that, like shorter lifespans or prevalence of health issues that are much less of a problem in other countries.
In other words You should get healthier even if chemtrails don’t cause it.
j_w
The issue is that if you have a claim like "American's should get healthier" I would presume that you would have evidence that they are unhealthy in the first place (Note: I am not disputing this). If the evidence you supply for your claim is fabricated, then either your claim is bullshit or you are the wrong person for the job.
RFK Jr. just often hits the first target and is always hitting the second.
nssnsjsjsjs
Maha is an Arabic name too.
AStonesThrow
مها
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_(name)
How cute, the script even looks like a little flower on its side, with a bent stem?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_bint_Mishari_Al_Saud
महा (mahā) 'great'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja
Etc.
sandworm101
Any references to the lingering effects of paracites, specifically those gained by eating undercooked bear meat? Asking for a friend.
dudefeliciano
Contributing to the collapse of society as we know it seems to be a long term side effect
lostlogin
Brilliance and foresight? I reaLly hope so.
alwahi
probably generated by chatgpt too
max_
I think LLMs are a net negative.
I am part of Value Investors Club.
And Stock analysis submissions have been halted as too many people were simply submitting AI generated slop [0]
[0]: valueinvestorsclub.com/ideas
pjc50
LLMs will basically destroy every open submission forum. It's very sad.
roenxi
[flagged]
mkfs
I haven't been keeping track. Does HN still think humans are supposed to be in ketosis 24/7, and that fruits are dangerous because
> muh sugar
and that it's important to stress that the "sugar lobby" has completely distorted the scientific record (without any mention of Beef checkoff or the dairy lobby)?
What's obviously needed is for OpenAI to invest 4B in a CaaS (Citations-as-a-Service) startup that autogenerates the studies their AI makes up.