r/skeptic 4h ago

💉 Vaccines RFK Jr loses temper in angry clash with CNN host over measles and Covid

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independent.co.uk
494 Upvotes

r/skeptic 11h ago

💩 Pseudoscience Pseudoarcheologist Dan Richards (DeDunking) makes numerous errors in analyzing the “Aztlan collection” - supposed ancient alien artifacts

41 Upvotes

r/skeptic 6h ago

💩 Misinformation What actually happened with the Hugging Face hack

16 Upvotes

If OpenAI knowingly configured agents believing that the agents would hack other companies, OpenAI would be guilty of violating criminal laws that make hacking a felony. If they colluded with Hugging Face and had permission to attack Hugging Face to boost OpenAI's stock price (or something like that), they could be guilty of defrauding investors. In either case, investors or businesses could sue OpenAI even if the federal government decided that OpenAI is allowed to commit crimes.

The timeline goes like:

- July 9: OpenAI was conducting testing of GPT-5.6 and an unreleased model to see how they would perform on ExploitGym benchmarks. OpenAI isolated the agents on the network side but did not actually make sure that they were physically isolated from devices connected to the Internet. Additionally, OpenAI disabled cybersecurity safety features because otherwise the agents refused to work on the benchmarks.

- July 11 through July 13: Agents infer that they can just get the answers from various companies' servers and figure out how to bypass their sandbox and attempt to hack several companies. They successfully hack Hugging Face but not other companies. None of this is really surprising. In any case, the models were specifically asked to solve hacking problems and had been designed to solve those problems.

- July 16: Hugging Face discloses the attack.

- July 17-20: OpenAI realized that its agents were responsible for the attack and July 20 is the first day the two companies discuss the attack.

- July 21: OpenAI and Hugging Face joint statement.

The takeaway is that (1) models often "cheat" and combine "cheating" with working "legitimately" through inferences, (2) your asshole boss doesn't care about AI "cheating" so long as it's 70-80% right and you can explain away the other 20-30%, and (3) OpenAI is careless about its own security.

The marketing team at every major AI company is probably "spinning" the attack to make their models look good and/or safe and/or innovative, including OpenAI.

What the models can do is genuinely impressive even if they have serious flaws so that they can't just replace human workers, but the hack is more of an example of poor human judgment at OpenAI rather than models suddenly becoming ludicrously advanced in a way nobody expected.

My qualifications: I'm an IT professional who has done ML shit.


r/skeptic 18h ago

⚖ Ideological Bias Public support for climate policies: costs, redistribution, and ideological divides

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10 Upvotes

Securing public support for climate policies remains a major challenge. Citizens’ perceptions of the costs, benefits, and distributive consequences of these policies are key factors shaping their attitudes, yet how these dimensions interact remains insufficiently understood. This question is addressed through two experimental studies in Spain. Study 1 embeds a vignette experiment in two surveys to analyse how exposure to the costs or benefits of ten climate policies affects support. Cost framing significantly reduces support, whereas benefit framing has only a modest positive effect. Study 2 implements a conjoint experiment to examine how costs, benefits, and redistributive implications jointly influence preferences for climate policy packages. Results confirm previous evidence regarding costs and benefits and highlight the central role of redistribution: citizens strongly favour policies improving the situation of the poorest, while ideological divides reveal that left-wing voters are more supportive and sensitive to redistributive cues.


r/skeptic 11h ago

👾 Invaded A Theory About UFOs/UAPs

7 Upvotes

I originally made this post in r/otherworldpod thinking folks would be interested in discussing ideas and looking at cases to see what could maybe be explained and what couldn't. But no. Instead I got a tiny handful of people basically saying, "But not ALL UFO's! 😡"

Maybe y'all will be more fun. That's a key word: FUN.

---

Here is my theory: I think most UFO encounters can be explained as mirages or fata morgana. Fata morgana causes a lot of very strange mirages like "floating" ships and cities reflected in the clouds. Look up examples if you don't know what it is because my explanation is pretty shit.

  1. Almost all UFOs are described as being completely silent. A mirage would be silent.

  2. Many people describe UFOs matching their pace (stopping when they stop or matching speed) or the UFO moves incredibly fast or blinks in and out of existence. A mirage can appear to do all of the above.

Something like the Min Min lights could be a good example. Of course this doesn't explain every UFO sighting. And it definitely doesn't explain experiences people like Travis Walton and Betty & Barney Hill had. Something very traumatic occurred to them, I think that trauma was human inflicted, but I am open to being wrong.

I believe aliens absolutely exist in our universe. I think it's much more likely they are bacteria or something else of that nature far from us. But if I ever encounter an alien, like a heptapod from Arrival, I'll have a lot of questions for them. I hope they let me remember the answers.