Scientific Rigor (Mortis)

File under: the writers aren’t being very subtle, are they?

I’m sure you will all be shocked to learn that Make America Sick Diseased Hemorrhage Healthy Again report was farmed out to an LLM, which, predictably, hallucinated citations and misattributed arguments.

Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto broke the story at NOTUS:

The anxiety study wasn’t the only one the report cites that appears to be mysteriously absent from the scientific literature. A section describing the “corporate capture of media” highlights two studies that it says are “broadly illustrative” of how a rise in direct-to-consumer drug advertisements has led to more prescriptions being written for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids.

In one section about mental health medication, which Kennedy has railed against for years, the report cites a review paper it claims shows that therapy alone is as or more effective than psychiatric medicine. But one of that paper’s statisticians told NOTUS that conclusion doesn’t make sense, given their study didn’t even attempt to measure or compare therapy’s effectiveness as a mental health treatment.

“We did not include psychotherapy in our review. We only compared the effectiveness of (new generation) antidepressants against each other, and against placebo,” Joanne McKenzie, a biostatistics professor at an Australian university, said in an email.

The New York Times found additional problems, and notes that:

Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”

The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.

You think?

Perhaps the New York Times shouldn’t have treated the report as a legitimate document in the first place.

Meanwhile, Republicans have finally started pushing back on Kennedy and his merry bad of charlatans… for tarnishing the good name of a pesticide. Now, in all fairness the initial NYT coverage of the report not only discusses that conflict, it also uses it as an example of the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the MAGA-MAHA alliance. The White House’s regulatory policy is objectively pro-corporation and pro-pollution. Kennedy thinks that corporations are poisoning Americans with toxins.

So far, we’re getting the worst of both worlds. The White House will let most corporations — so long as they don’t make Trump mad – dump all of their negative externalities on the America people. MAHA will destroy our public health infrastructure while promoting pseudoscience and snake oil.

Lucky us.