Damn, what the MVP does right now, is check for already established facts. So basically, what we define as fact is something that has proof. For example, we stray away from political views as those are opinions, and stay with “facts”. As for disputed facts, we would also stay away from them unless they have a significantly larger backing than the other. The source currently is LLMs that are trained on huge amounts of data. We have a learn more feature, so whenever you get a suggestion, it gives you the link that the information was pulled from so you can check yourself to see the source. So in a nutshell, we focus more on known solid facts like historic and scientific information. And we are not capping about our age, here is my linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-jiang1/
The goal is admirable. But "fact checking" is complicated and intelligent people can disagree. And a lot of people understand that having a centralized source of "truth" isn't desirable.
The mathematical disciplines have proofs. That is, "facts" that are attained by deduction. Science can be rigorous, but it isn't driven through proofs. Science is empirical. A lot of the time, scientific research is not accessible and requires expert consensus. In any case, my guess is that most people aren't going to be fact checking math and physics, but socially relevant claims. And those are usually politicized.
The point is: I don't know how you're going to decide on "facts" or "truth" using AI without there being bias or domain expertise & understanding, especially considering that we know LLMs hallucinate. Again, keep in mind that educated people (experts) can disagree on social claims. Sorry if this is discouraging, but I'm just trying to be realistic.
A core part of the problem is a lack of trust in institutions. People feel the experts aren't experts, feel the experts lie, or feel the experts have different and sometimes malicious goals.
Even if that weren't the case new institutions should be less trusted than those with a solid history.
So this new institution is trying to convince people of things. Why would my flat-earther coworker believe factful.io when they don't believe NASA?
I dont think this or any centralized tool or team can solve misinformation, despite that I think this is a worthwhile goal and I hope that you improve the situation as much as possible.
Sometimes I hear about nutrition/food studies done in academia which were funded by big food corporations. It's probably also common in the medical field to have big pharma doing the sponsoring. I don't disagree with you. Lack of trust is a problem in some ways. But I've also become used to the idea that determining truth includes scrutinizing the source. It really is a lot of work.
It absolutely can be a lot of work, but sometimes the statement or stance is self-disproving.
I once worked with a conspiracy theory believer who thought that the Earth was simultaneously a flat disk and a hollow sphere. This person wasn't obviously a fool in normal conversation. They had no trouble writing C++, they had a master's degree in math, they recently purchased a second house and we're doing the repairs themselves to flip it, and he was comfortable with writing SQL for the application we're working in.
But he absolutely refused to believe that "they" weren't out to get him. In retrospect it was clear that this was likely standing from anti-Semitic conspiracy backgrounds but more than once I asked him to verify if he meant actual lizard people or if that was code for something, and with great conviction he told me he actually believes some of our leaders were lizards.
This person fundamentally didn't trust our institutions. He thought at the Airlines and that the government were being headed by literal lizard people in human suits. He had access to all the evidence to the contrary, but he had been betrayed so many times by the government that he saw no reason to trust anything from them and refused any photographs I produced from NASA.
No how hard I worked to produce and vet information citing sources, or even produce experiments that he can reproduce, he just wouldn't trust anything that appeared to line up with what he perceived to be the goals of the government.
Worse, something so many people attached to reality deny is that people like him are common. I fully believe that one in three Americans are as delusional as this guy at least some of the time.
You are probably correct. If you are it is something millions of people suffer from, an inability to work with evidence or vet sources. Like how symbols are hard to parse for some, dyslexia, or math incomprehensible to some dyscalculia. How are dysevidentia or dyslogia?
Your take is one of the only grounded takes I’ve seen. I’m sorry but are the majority of posters here delusional? I thought hacker news was meant to be intelligent people who would give good actual grounded advice to people, not just blindly tell people their very flawed ideas/goals are great
