All posts tagged: false

False Evacuation Orders Are the Last Thing L.A. Needs

False Evacuation Orders Are the Last Thing L.A. Needs

In my neighborhood—a mobile-home park on the western side of Malibu—the power and gas have been out for days, and cell service is intermittent at best. If I drive to the right vantage points, I can see the Palisades Fire and Kenneth Fire—two of the five major fires blazing across Los Angeles—but they are still far away. My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family’s phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service. As far as I can tell, these notices have all been in error. Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County’s emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. (The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The first alert jolted my phone yesterday afternoon. My …

The False Promise of Seasonal-Color Analysis

The False Promise of Seasonal-Color Analysis

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color. Explore the February 2025 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More The press created a minor moral panic (“un scandale optique,” a French journal called it), which it then attempted to solve. An 1859 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American women’s magazine of the antebellum era, promised to help “ill-dressed and gaudy-looking women” by invoking a prominent color theorist, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, and his ideas about which colors were most “becoming” on various (presumably white) women. Chevreul advocated “delicate green” for those with fair skin “deficient in rose”; yellow for brunettes; …

San Francisco Art Scene Is Thriving, Even Amid ‘False Doom Narrative’

San Francisco Art Scene Is Thriving, Even Amid ‘False Doom Narrative’

Earlier this year, dealer Rebecca Camacho was standing in her new and expanded downtown San Francisco gallery in Jackson Square, when she paused and pointed to the arched windows facing the street. “There have been people constantly walking by. It’s alive!” she said. Others in parts of downtown San Francisco, like the Union Square area near Camacho’s previous location, have a different perspective. Nearly 37 percent of the office buildings there remain empty post-pandemic, a rate that is higher than the national average. Vacancies have contributed to the shuttering of retail spaces. Plus, San Francisco officials have said they are struggling to contend with homelessness and a drug overdose epidemic, while the cost of living remains prohibitively high. Related Articles Having lost her re-election bid in November, Mayor London Breed appeared to pay for this cocktail of circumstances, which the media has dubbed a “doom loop.” In that scenario, San Francisco has effectively been written off as a ghost town, and the city’s arts sector suffering as a consequence. Such portrayals gave the impression “the …

Plato’s Philebus: What Is False Pleasure?

Plato’s Philebus: What Is False Pleasure?

  Plato’s Philebus is a dialogue about the value of pleasure, knowledge, wisdom, and reason. Which should be pursued for their own sake, and which should be prioritized last? Throughout the debate with his interlocutor about the nature of pleasure, Plato argues that pleasure, like judgments, can be true or false. But feelings can’t be true or false—they just are. So, is pleasure just a feeling, or was Plato correct? This article analyzes Plato’s argument for false pleasures in greater detail.   Introduction to Plato’s Philebus Plato, Giordano Luca, 1660. Source: WikiArt   In the Philebus, we follow a dialogue between Socrates and Protarchus, where each offers an answer to what, for humans, is the best sort of life. Or, what kind of life is most akin to the Good? Socrates (to everyone’s surprise) argues for wisdom, while Protarchus argues that pleasure is actually closer to the Good.   Amid this contest, Socrates, somewhat out of nowhere, asserts that there are “false pleasures” in the same sort of way that we say that there are …

NYC Attempt to Scan Subway for Weapons With AI Fails Miserably as System Flooded by False Positives While Detecting Zero Actual Guns

NYC Attempt to Scan Subway for Weapons With AI Fails Miserably as System Flooded by False Positives While Detecting Zero Actual Guns

Eat your heart out, Eric Adams. Falsity Fallacy New York City has been forced to reveal that its AI-powered gun-scanning pilot for its sprawling subway system was a total bust. As CBS New York reports, experts who long opposed the Evolv startup’s AI subway scanning tech — championed by embattled Mayor Eric Adams — have been vindicated now that the pilot has been shelved. After City & State pointed out that the New York Police Department had been silent about the month-long test, launched at the end of July, officials were forced to reveal to the website its underwhelming results: that the subway scanners had recovered exactly zero guns and 12 knives. Those figures were dwarfed by the fact that it had also turned up more than 118 false positives. “That’s 118 additional New Yorkers who were subjected to additional stop and search, who had their privacy invaded for no reason,” Legal Aid Society attorney Diane Akerman told CBS. “The fact that the NYPD notes 12 knives but no arrests leads me to believe these were …

You Can Insert False Memories Into ChatGPT, Researcher Finds

You Can Insert False Memories Into ChatGPT, Researcher Finds

“The prompt injection inserted a memory into ChatGPT’s long-term storage.” Remember Me OpenAI has quietly released a new feature that instructs ChatGPT to “remember” prior conversations — and as one researcher-slash-hacker found, it’s easily exploited. As Ars Technica reports, security researcher Johann Rehberger found earlier this year that there was a vulnerability in the chatbot’s “long-term conversation memory” tool, which instructs the AI to remember details between conversations and store them in a memory file. Released in beta in February and to the broader public at the beginning of September, Rehberger figured out that the feature is easy to trick. As the researcher noted in a May blog post, all it took was a bit of crafty prompting by uploading a third-party file, such as a Microsoft Word document that contains the “false” memories listed as bullet points, to convince the chatbot that Rehberger was more than 100 years old and lived in the Matrix. Upon finding this exploit, Rehberger privately reported it to OpenAI, which instead of doing anything about it simply closed the ticket he opened …

Repetition boosts belief in false climate claims, even for climate science advocates

Repetition boosts belief in false climate claims, even for climate science advocates

A new study, published in PLOS One, highlights a disturbing phenomenon: when people are repeatedly exposed to claims, they tend to believe them more, even if the claims are false or counter to their beliefs. This research focused specifically on climate change, examining whether repetition could make even climate-skeptical claims seem more truthful to those who support climate science. The results show that repetition increases the perception of truth not only for claims aligned with climate science but also for those that contradict it. The study, led by Yangxueqing (Mary) Jiang, a PhD student in psychology at the Australian National University, aimed to explore a pressing issue in today’s information landscape: the spread of misinformation, particularly around climate change. While it is well-established that repeating a claim can make it seem more believable—an effect known as the “illusory truth effect”—most previous research has focused on general knowledge or trivia. Jiang and her team wanted to push this understanding further by examining whether the same effect would hold when it comes to strongly held beliefs, such …

Trump’s Latest False Claim Is a Huge Tell

Trump’s Latest False Claim Is a Huge Tell

When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together. And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Read: Trump can’t deal with Harris’s success The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect …

Private schools are labouring under false pretenses on VAT

Private schools are labouring under false pretenses on VAT

More from this theme Recent articles Labour has announced that it will levy VAT on school fees. I imagine few of my readers are directly affected – either as worried parents, or as worried heads or teachers. But heh, it is nice to look over the fence once in a while, especially when you can have a chuckle at a sector we are all too often envious of.  A car costing three times as much as a Ford or Vauxhall is a luxury car. Private schools often cost three times a state school’s funding level; they too meet the common-sense definition of a luxury good. VAT on private schools is perfectly defensible – even if part of me dislikes the idea of taxing any form of education. (“First they came for the private schools, and I did nothing, because I did not work in one. Then they came for hardback books, and I did nothing because I always bought paperbacks. Then they came for school lunches, and I did nothing because I always made a …