Recent quotes:

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy | PNAS

Artificial intelligence (AI)–synthesized text, audio, image, and video are being weaponized for the purposes of nonconsensual intimate imagery, financial fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Our evaluation of the photorealism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces.

The Answer to a COVID-19 Vaccine May Lie in Our Genes, But ... - Scientific American Blog Network

While 37 percent were unwilling to provide their DNA data to a technology company (like 23andMe), about the same percent were unwilling to provide it to a hospital (40 percent), a government health institute (37 percent), a pharmaceutical firm (40 percent) or a university (35 percent).

How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials

After seeing so many cases of fraud, alongside typos and mistakes, Carlisle has developed his own theory of what drives some researchers to make up their data. “They think that random chance on this occasion got in the way of the truth, of how they know the Universe really works,” he says. “So they change the result to what they think it should have been.”

Patients react better when doctors imply uncertainty, rather than state it directly -- ScienceDaily

Diagnostic uncertainty is widespread in clinical practice and physician guidelines generally recommend that doctors explain the degree of uncertainty associated with their diagnosis. However, how exactly doctors should communicate uncertainty is a matter of debate. This communication can lower visit satisfaction, decrease adherence to doctor instructions, lessen trust, and decrease confidence in the doctor. The researchers here surveyed parents of pediatric patients who hypothetically received a diagnosis with an element of uncertainty. The uncertainty in the diagnosis was communicated in one of three ways; either with an explicit expression of uncertainty (such as "I'm not sure which disease this is"), an implicit expression of uncertainty using broad differential diagnoses (such as "it could be this disease or this other disease"), or another implicit expression of uncertainty (such as "it is most likely this disease"). Researchers found that explicit expressions of uncertainty were associated with lower perceived technical competence of the doctor, less trust and confidence, and a less willingness to adhere to doctors' advice. "Misdiagnosis is common in medical practice and to enable improvements, uncertainty of diagnosis is something both doctors and patients will need to embrace" said Hardeep Singh, MD, MPH, senior author and researcher at the Houston Veterans Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety and Baylor College of Medicine. "Our study provides a foundation for future development of evidence-based guidance on how doctors can best communicate diagnostic uncertainty to patients to improve diagnosis and care outcomes."

More trust = giving more, expecting kharma

To measure trust and its reciprocation (trustworthiness) objectively, my team used a strategic decision task developed by researchers in the lab of Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics. In our experiment, a participant chooses an amount of money to send to a stranger via computer, knowing that the money will triple in amount and understanding that the recipient may or may not share the spoils. Therein lies the conflict: The recipient can either keep all the cash or be trustworthy and share it with the sender. To measure oxytocin levels during the exchange, my colleagues and I developed a protocol to draw blood from people’s arms before and immediately after they made decisions to trust others (if they were senders) or to be trustworthy (if they were receivers). Because we didn’t want to influence their behavior, we didn’t tell participants what the study was about, even though there was no way they could consciously control how much oxytocin they produced. We found that the more money people received (denoting greater trust on the part of senders), the more oxytocin their brains produced. And the amount of oxytocin recipients produced predicted how trustworthy—that is, how likely to share the money—they would be. Since the brain generates messaging chemicals all the time, it was possible we had simply observed random changes in oxytocin. To prove that it causes trust, we safely administered doses of synthetic oxytocin into living human brains (through a nasal spray). Comparing participants who received a real dose with those who received a placebo, we found that giving people 24 IU of synthetic oxytocin more than doubled the amount of money they sent to a stranger.

The Neuroscience of Trust

Respondents whose companies were in the top quartile indicated they had 106% more energy and were 76% more engaged at work than respondents whose firms were in the bottom quartile. They also reported being 50% more productive—which is consistent with our objective measures of productivity from studies we have done with employees at work. Trust had a major impact on employee loyalty as well: Compared with employees at low-trust companies, 50% more of those working at high-trust organizations planned to stay with their employer over the next year, and 88% more said they would recommend their company to family and friends as a place to work.

What is the future of news? Bleak, probably. - Vox

I really think that what we're seeing now with this influx of fake news is the end result of the systemic defunding of media entities for the past 10 years, if not more. We could see this happening in slow motion. We all knew that as trusted media entities began producing less investigative stories, less hard news stories, an information vacuum would emerge into which bullshit and propaganda would drop. This was inevitable.

Once in 3 billion years? Fix your model.

The Oct. 15 gyration, when Treasury yields fluctuated by almost 0.4 percentage point, was an “unprecedented move” that would have serious consequences in a stressed environment[…] Treasuries are supposed to be among the most stable securities. […]It’s just a matter of time until some political, economic or market event triggers another financial crisis, he said, without predicting one is imminent. The Treasuries move was “an event that is supposed to happen only once in every 3 billion years or so,” Dimon wrote. A future crisis could be worsened because there “is a greatly reduced supply of Treasuries to go around.”

Proposal to enable people to vet information at page level

The list of rebuttals to a given page would need to be constructed by real humans. People are still required to identify whether a page is critical of another or not, and will continue to be required until we are able to create artificial intelligence which can understand the intention of a human author.Each list of rebuttals would be tied to a specific piece of content — usually a specific webpage, but as so often happens, the content of this webpage may be cloned, and all such clones would ideally be collapsed into a single entity within the system, so that any time a rebuttal was added to any of the clones, all other clones would reflect that new addition.The system must also remain completely neutral. All rebutted, corrected, debunked etc content is only in the system because ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ on the web has created a critical response to it. Just because a page has been critiqued does not necessarily mean it is wrong. It just means someone disagrees with it.
But Wednesday, spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury confirmed what I'd suspected: "The ad has not appeared on Comcast Spotlight and media reports and press releases to the contrary are incorrect." What happened here? It seems that MarijuanaDoctors.com jumped the gun, publishing its press release before it was sure the ad was going to air. "All commercials are subject to final review by Comcast Spotlight prior to airing and during that process it was determined that the spot did not meet our guidelines," Khoury said. When I told Draizin this on Thursday, he disputed it. He told me that "the ads continue to be aired," adding "We are receiving phone calls from patients and doctors in New Jersey who have seen the ads." (My guess is the phone calls were from people who had seen the video on YouTube or in the media coverage that ensued.)
In response to a question about when he realized he could trust Poitras, he wrote: “We came to a point in the verification and vetting process where I discovered Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I’m famously paranoid.”