Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”

• In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

How the world’s richest man is boosting the British right | UK News | Sky News

• For nine months, Sky News’ Data and Forensics team has been investigating whether X’s algorithm amplifies right-wing and extreme content. It does. Read our full methodology here.

Tasks

• Water plants – done
• Storage run – done
• Looks like the first freeze will be next Monday night Tuesday morning. See what can be pulled in from the garden

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup – done
• 1:30 NSTIC something? Dull
• 4:00 Weekly – wound up being a capability brief?

Tasks

• Fix fixee flat
• Storage run

SBIRs

• Run the story generator for all variants. I realize that I want to try some political trajectories too, if the results for this look good. Also, because the number of walks will be low, this should be a 2D map at first. – done
• Started on the extractor/embedder

LLM Agents

• 2:30 meeting – fun! Spent a lot of time talking about coffee. And I have a talk I need to give next Tuesday
• Add Something about right-wing propaganda bots to the “what to do” section – done

Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars

• Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators.

Tasks

• Ping Nellie – done
• Fix fixee flat
• Pay Michael – done
• Pinged Aaron
• Groceries – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• Assemble a list of ChatUnits as the story develops and see how that works – It works very well! Generated a bunch of stories and tweaked the prompts. Created two story methods – one for RAG and one control.

An a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service

• A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms. 

Tasks

• Ping Nellie
• Water plants – done
• Fix fixee flat
• Email Michael after tweaking the first refusal response – done
• Ping Nathan and/or Edwins – done

SBIRs

• Keep on working with the story prompting. I think I need to graduate the story objects to their own file as they are getting to be good sized.
  • Add binary saving and loading
  • Finish a full story
  • See if I can tweak the model to do less reasoning for these tests
  • Start playing around with getting embeddings and clustering. The goal will be to some good ratio of number of clusters to cluster size. Somehow, I think this is related to the value of the skip-gram acting as an attractor/repulsor. There is probably some kind of magic ratio that I can look for