The Collapse of Our Knowledge System

Last updated on: June 14, 2025 at 2:05 pm By Gene Veith

“The biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press,” says cultural critic Ted Gioia. It’s a shift on the scale of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In such movements, “the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place.”

This new cultural phase doesn’t have a name yet. So Gioia says, “Let’s call it The Collapse of the Knowledge System.”

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once. If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case. The crisis has spread into every sector of society that relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

Ted Gioia, the brother of poet Dana Gioia, is described by the Free Press as “one of the sharpest observers of the warp speed changes underway in our culture.” He goes on in that webzine to list 10 bits of evidence for his thesis (to which I will add a few of my own):

(1) Scientific studies don’t replicate. Gioia points out that 40% or more of published scientific research cannot be replicated by other researchers. By the canons of the scientific method, that means they are invalid. Not only that, according to a study he links to, non-replicable research is cited 153 times more often than verifiable scientific research, reportedly because the phony findings are more interesting than valid findings!

(2) Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before. What with what we were told about COVID, the constantly changing pronouncements about what is good for us and what isn’t, the flagrant bias of academia, and the conflicting messages of our online authorities (my examples), people just don’t trust the professional class of experts. Gioia observes,

The only experts who still possess authority are blue-collar ones. The public still wants to hire the best plumber or car mechanic or hair stylist, and will pay more if these workers have established a reputation for expertise. But the expertise of white-collar professionals is derided at every turn.

(3) The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many have only unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation. We blogged about this in this week’s Monday Miscellany, with our item entitled, “Unemployment Rate for Computer Engineering Grads Is Double That of Art History Majors.”

(4) Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector. This is not just a matter of the Trump administration cutting grants to woke universities. It is happening more broadly. Private funding sources for scientific research is also drying up. Observes Gioia, “Even the huge corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists.” But science and technology require ongoing research.

(5) Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies. As tuition soars, the value of a degree plummets. And all sides of the general public are angry at universities, with their bloated bureaucracies, elitist attitudes, self-serving curricula, and indifference to students.

(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels, from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard’s president. But the authorities just take it for granted. “A healthy knowledge system requires honesty and accountability, and not long ago this was taken for granted,” observes Gioia. “But plagiarism is now everywhere and taken for granted.”

(7) AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted. “The people running the knowledge system complacently accept all the deceit, lies, and hallucinations. They do so without any ethical qualms or even anxiety.” The public recognizes this irresponsibility of the experts who control this new knowledge system. Thus,” the very speed and intensity with which new tech is implemented actually accelerates the collapse of the entire knowledge hierarchy.”

(8) Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve. Gioia gives an abundance of examples that we could all no doubt come up with ourselves.

(9) Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, Covid, etc.). “Tech start-ups were once admired, praised, and emulated. But they are now treated with intense scrutiny and skepticism. There have been too many scandals, too many frauds, too many cover-ups. These are so common that the media hardly even reports on them anymore. . . .But nobody is shocked anymore. [The public] lost trust in knowledge tech industries long ago.”

(10) We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science.” Gioia uses a Google word frequency graph to show that the phrase “fake science,” which we now hear all the time and all sides use it against each other, didn’t really exist until the 21st century. In the 20th century and before that, if information was “fake,” it wasn’t science. “In those days, science was considered emblematic of truth.”

But when the knowledge structure collapses, science loses its privileged access to truth. At the final stage, it gets harder and harder to distinguish science from propaganda. We are now living in that nightmare scenario.

Let me add a few items to this “nightmare scenario” of the collapse of our knowledge scenario:

—The failure of our public schools. Gioia thinks our higher education as practiced in our leading universities is bad, and he is right. But our primary and secondary education, as practiced in our public school system, is far worse and impacts a broader sector of our population. In many cities and communities, despite a huge, expensive, and entrenched educational establishment, children are just not getting educated.

—The dead end of contemporary thought. If truth is relative, knowledge is impossible. If the true, the good, and the beautiful are nothing more than impositions of power on the part of the privileged class in order to oppress marginalized groups, the only meaningful pursuit is politics, by which your group can seize power so that it can oppress the former oppressors. These principles explain why the whole range of our educational institutions has replaced the acquisition of knowledge with political indoctrination. Such axioms of contemporary thought–which have been busy challenging and subverting our traditional knowledge system– are intellectual, moral, and aesthetic dead ends.

—“True science” is leading to less understanding rather than more. There is, in fact, true science as well as fake science, which is making huge advances. But what quantum physics is disclosing about nature is that reality is far more complex, mysterious, and unfathomable than Enlightenment-era rationalism and materialism ever expected. This is not a fault of our knowledge system but a demonstration that our former assumptions about the explanatory power of science was naive and incomplete. We are in need of a larger worldview.

So is Gioia right, that our knowledge system is collapsing? If he is, what comes next? Let’s talk about that tomorrow.

Publicity photo of Ted Gioia by Dave Shafer via the Ted Gioia website. “This photo can be used for media and publicity purposes.”

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Protests, Riots, and Sending in the Troops

Last updated on: June 16, 2025 at 7:42 am By Gene Veith

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Protests against efforts to deport illegal immigrants in Los Angeles degenerated into riots, as protesters burned vehicles, looted shops, and attacked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents with rocks, hunks of concrete, and fireworks.

President Trump called out the National Guard, which deployed some 4,000 troops, as well as 700 Marines to help restore order.

Normally, that’s the job of state governors, but California governor Newsom did not want Trump’s intervention, resulting in a back-and-forth court battle that for the moment left Trump in control.

Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (“power of the county”), the military may not be used for civilian law enforcement purposes, but with some exceptions. The Trump administration has invoked the law against “seditious conspiracy,” which, as Andrew McCarthy points out, allows for such intervention,

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof.

The troops are reportedly being used to guard the federal building that is the locus of many of the protests, as well as to protect federal ICE agents. They have no arrest powers, though they can detain individuals, they must turn them over to local police.

But Gov. Newsom is describing Trump’s sending troops to quell the protests as the advent of dictatorship. He stated,

‘This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived.’

More immigration protests are breaking out in other cities, but progressives are bradening the cause. Already, in addition to flying Mexican flags, some protesters have been waving Palestinian flags. Now “No Kings” rallies, accusing Trump of trying to rule as a king, are being planned in all 50 states.

Progressive states and cities have a track record of letting left-wing riots run their course, as they did during the George Floyd riots, even in cases of large-scale arson, looting, and assaults. Gov. Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass are sympathetic to the illegal immigrants–Los Angeles is a “sanctuary city”–though the city police and highway patrol have been arresting violent demonstrators. This is doubtless why Trump moved so quickly.

Progressives have been wanting Democrats to “do something” about Trump, so they are rallying around Gov. Newsom as the leader they have been hoping for.

But doesn’t the left see that rioting, looting, and stoning law enforcement agents only confirms for the general public that the illegal immigrants need to be deported?

Are large-scale protests ever effective in changing people’s minds? I came across some research that found that which ever side employs violence turns the public against them and their cause. During the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrators under the leadership of Martin Luther King, who turned non-violence into a tactic, were very effective in swaying the public, especially when the peaceful protesters were met by violent police with fire-hoses and billy clubs. But when protesters were the violent ones, as in the Watts riots, public opinion turned against them.

Nevertheless, as NBC reports, protests that start as peaceful are being taken over by “revolutionaries”–Antifa, Marxists, Jihadists–who openly call for and celebrate destruction, looting, and assassination.

Photo: California National Guard in front of protestors (9 June 2025) by U.S. Northern Command – https://x.com/USNorthernCmd/status/1932256787626860604, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=167354134

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Empirical Evidence on Vocation

Last updated on: May 19, 2025 at 1:47 pm By Gene Veith

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I was asked to review a new book from Oxford University Press entitled Religion in a Changing Workplace.

Elaine Howard Ecklund (a sociologist at Rice), Denise Daniels (a business professor at Wheaton), and Christopher P. Scheitle (a sociologist at the University of West Virginia) polled some 15,000 people and conducted interviews with hundreds of them regarding religious issues in the workplace.

The book was filled with interesting information on a wide range of topics, but what struck me the most is that it offers, in effect, the first large-scale empirical study of vocation that I’m aware of.

See my review at Religion & Liberty Online entitled Faith at Work: The Difference ‘Calling’ Can Make, with the deck, “A major study of religious issues in the workplace gives empirical backing to the doctrine of vocation.”

Read the whole review. I touch on the difference between Luther’s understanding of vocation and that of Calvin (“who narrowed again what Luther broadened out”). And I critique the father of sociology Max Weber, who said that the Protestant work ethic derived from Calvinists who thought that making lots of money was evidence that they were of the elect. (“Now, I have known a number of Calvinists, both living [in my circle of acquaintances] and dead [as a specialist in 17th-century religious literature]. Yet I have never known any who thought like this.”)

But let me give you some of the empirical data from the study that I cite from my review:

The authors cite previous research sorting out how people view their work: as a “job” (that is, as simply a practical necessity to earn a living); as a “career” (satisfying personal ambitions); or as a “calling” (personally fulfilling because it serves a higher purpose and makes a difference in the world).

The current study, however, finds that 20% of American workers see what they do as a “spiritual calling.” This is true of 38% of evangelical Protestants, 23% of mainline Protestants, and 18% of Catholics. Of the “very religious,” 44% have this sense of calling, while 22% of the “moderately religious” and only 8% of the “not religious” do.

Of those who have a sense of calling, 53% are “very satisfied” in their work, compared with 39% who don’t. Of those who consider their work to be a calling, 61% say their faith helps them find meaning and purpose in their daily tasks, compared with 13% who don’t. Those who feel called also better coped with problems at work, experienced less stress, and found a higher purpose, “especially when facing work that is either extremely challenging or mundane.”. . .

According to their findings, the most common verbal religious expression in the workplace is not proselytizing but attempts to offer some sort of spiritual support to a colleague in need. The most common expression of prayer in the workplace is not in the lunchroom or in support of some work-related task. Rather, it is in the context of caring for a fellow worker with a problem by saying, “I’ll pray for you.”. . .

Religious workers we spoke to were most likely to intervene or speak up when unethical behavior affected someone for whom they were directly responsible. These workers would use their faith as a resource to step in and confront authority figures and structures, often based on a religious imperative to love and care for others.

In the section on what responders said about the meaning and purpose of their work, each of the types described involved helping others: “Products and services benefit others.” “Work provides money and skills to serve or help others outside of work (congregation and community).” “Worker feels like their skills put to good use.” “Work provides opportunity to serve coworkers and/or customers.”

All this supports Luther’s view of vocation, that the purpose of every calling—in the workplace, in marriage, in parenthood, in our citizenship, in the church—is to love and serve our neighbors.

Doubtless few of the 15,000 respondents know anything about Luther’s doctrine of vocation. They certainly do not offer prayers for their colleagues or stand up for them when they are mistreated because Luther told them to. Luther was simply describing how ordinary Christians, in fact, live out their faith in their ordinary callings. . . .

The wealth of data gleaned by the authors of this book contains some surprises. Critics of the doctrine of vocation have been saying that the teaching supports highly paid professionals who can be expected to find their work meaningful and satisfying but has little to offer low-paid manual workers, whose labor is a painful, meaningless slog. But this research has found that while the top leaders of companies do often have a sense of calling, workers who make less money are more likely to see their work as a calling than those who make more!

Also, to use DEI language, “marginalized” groups tend to have a stronger sense of calling than “privileged” groups: 31% of black workers do compared with 18% of white workers; 24% of women, compared with 17% of men. Interestingly, black workers are also the most likely to feel motivated to talk about their faith at work (36%), compared with white workers (26%). . . .

Religion in a Changing Workplace closes with recommendations, one of which is for organizations to help develop a sense of calling in their employees: “Organizational leaders can foster a sense of calling among their workers by emphasizing the purpose and value of their work, reminding them how their work helps others, or focusing on how the organization contributes to the common good.” That would almost certainly be more welcome than a DEI seminar.

Keep reading. . .

Photo by Angela Xu, The Church of Almighty God | Church life – Pray 013 via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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The Whirlwind

Last updated on: May 19, 2025 at 1:46 pm By Gene Veith

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Here in St. Louis, they blow the tornado sirens if radar picks up rotation in the sky anywhere in the county, so we’ve already been to the basement a half a dozen times since we moved here. So I didn’t think much of it when the siren blew on Friday afternoon.

We went down to the basement as instructed, and then it occurred to me that I could use this time to work on my blog.

So I went upstairs to get my computer exactly at 2:45 p.m. That was when it hit. The noise was deafening. The rain and hail were hitting so hard that it sounded like rattling, but with no time between the rattles. The wind was roaring. I looked out the window and could see almost nothing, the rain was so thick, except for a tree that was just flailing back and forth.

I high-tailed it back to the basement. In minutes, it was all over. I went back up and the sun was shining.

I went outside and saw that some bricks had been blown off of our building! I don’t know how that happened! One heavy decorative pediment on the corner of the roof had been blown down, but instead of falling straight to the ground and its weight would cause one to expect, the wind that blown it to the middle of our building, right in front of the door!

We checked on our daughter, who lives with her family on the seminary grounds in faculty housing, just a few blocks from where we are. A huge tree had fallen on their car and crushed it!

Our car seemed to be fine, but we couldn’t drive it because all the roads were blocked with downed trees. We walked over to their place, past blown down fences and other debris, as our neighbors peeked out to survey the damage.

The seminary grounds are quite beautiful, what with the gothic architecture and huge, majestic trees. Many of those trees had massive branches blown off, and some were completely knocked down. One tree must have been 50 feet tall, with a diameter of four feet. It was plucked out of the ground, roots still showing, lying on its side. It must have stood for 150 years or more, but it couldn’t withstand the tornado of 2025.

In our community, no one was killed or seriously injured—amazingly—though 5 were killed and 38 injured elsewhere in St. Louis county. Here in the Clayton neighborhood, houses were damaged, but not destroyed, though some people in the region did lose their homes.

I grew up in Oklahoma, the tornado capital of the world. We didn’t have a basement or a storm cellar, so when the sirens blew, we would drive to church, usually the Presbyterian Church, which had a better basement than our congregation. But that took time. I remember having to hide underneath our parents’ bed. I crawled out to look out the window and saw in the distance a funnel that had descended from the clouds. It was bearing down on us, but it dissipated before it hit our city limits.

I was in Norman, Oklahoma, for a speaking gig on the night that nearby Moore was hit by a monstrous EF-5 twister. (Ours in St. Louis was an EF-3, which was bad enough, but EF-5s are at the very top of the scale.) On the ride back to the airport in Oklahoma City, we drove through utter devastation, with strip malls, motels, fast food joints, and apartment complexes reduced to match sticks. A few years later, I flew back for another visit to Norman, arriving the day after Moore had been hit by yet another EF-5. We drove through utter devastation again, as all of the rebuilt homes and businesses were again reduced to match sticks.

So I know tornados. But I had never been in a tornado until last Friday in St. Louis. I had always assumed that the funnel is the tornado, so if you just dodge that, you’ll be OK. But, of course, a tornado is wind, which can’t be seen. The visible funnel is from the debris, but the circulating winds can be much wider, so the path of ours was several blocks wide. They can also hop from point to point, going back up into the clouds and then dropping down again a few miles later, so that a single tornado can travel a long ways, as this one did.

Friday was supposed to be graduation at the seminary, but all of the carefully lined up folding chairs on the quad were blown every which way, so the event was postponed until Saturday. In the meantime, Lutheran Disaster Relief, which is headquartered here in St. Louis but usually ships out all over the world, descended on the campus. I have to give them credit. Men with chain saws and trucks did a remarkable job in cutting apart the downed trees and hauling away the debris. Others pitched in, such as the children of students and faculty, including my grandchildren, who raked the lawns and set up the chairs again. I was proud of them and of the seminary community, indeed, of Clayton and St. Louis as a whole, as neighbors pulled together and city services were out immediately, round the clock, doing their jobs to get the city back on its feet.

Now we had to deal with being without electricity. You could see lots of trees that fell on power lines, making the restoration of power a huge task. And if you don’t have electricity, it isn’t just that you don’t have lights: your cell phones will run down, there is no internet, and the food in your refrigerators is going to be ruined.

Fortunately, other parts of the city still had power, but we had to become ingenious. At one point, I drove aimlessly, exploring the city, in order to charge our phones with our car. The cell phone system was also impacted, so my hot spot only intermittently let me be on line. Sometimes I could get on the free wifi of a grocery store not too far away, though it would periodically flicker off, making me lose what I had written. I write this on Monday and we still don’t have power. Some are saying it may be towards the end of the week before we do.

This week’s posts were mostly written before the tornado, but we hit the road next week, so I had intended to work ahead. I feel an obligation to you, my subscribers, who are paying good money to read my blog, to put up a daily post. So I am defying the natural disaster to do that!

“The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1). Indeed, whirlwinds, a.k.a. tornadoes, are some of nature’s most sublime and awe-inspiring manifestations, a fitting image for God’s overwhelming revelation (Job 38-40).

Photo: St. Louis tornado, May 16, 2025, view from the arch, webcam, Gateway Arch Foundation via Meteorologist Erin Moran, Facebook

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Monday Miscellany, 5/19/25

Last updated on: May 19, 2025 at 7:19 am By Gene Veith

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War as video game. North Korea’s remote worker scam. And the more powerful AI gets, the more it hallucinates.

UPDATE: We survived the St. Louis tornado, but it hit us. We just had minor damage with nobody hurt. More on this later, but blogging is a challenge with (still) no electricity.

War as Video Game

In Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, later made into a movie, children think they are playing a video game, only to find out that they are fighting an actual, real-life war. In the Ukraine, young soldiers are fighting an actual, real-life war as if it were a video game.

Veronika Melkozerova has written an article for Politico entitled Points for kills: How Ukraine is using video game incentives to slay more Russians.

The Ukraine has set up a point system for its drone units. For every enemy soldier their drones kill, they get 6 points. Destroying a tank wins 40 points. Destroying a mobile rock system wins 50 points.

The points are awarded based on video verification. They accumulate and can be traded in for new and advanced equipment, such as Vampire drones, which can carry a 15 kilogram (33 pound) warhead. The article quotes the Deputy Prime Minister:

He pointed to the accomplishments of Magyar’s Birds, one of Ukraine’s elite drone warfare units. It has run up a score of over 16,298 points, enough to buy 500 first-person view drones used in daytime operations, 500 drones for night operations, 100 Vampire drones and 40 reconnaissance drones, Fedorov said.

The concept behind the point system is to direct resources to the most effective units.

Because it’s a game, it has provoked competition between units, each of which wants to win. Now 90% of the drone controllers have racked up points, overwhelming the system. Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov said, “They started killing so quickly that Ukraine does not have time to deliver new drones.”

Officials have also learned that increasing the number of points awarded for different kinds of “kills” increases the number of those kills. For example, killing a person used to be worth just two points. But when they increased the award to six points, the number of enemies they killed doubled.

“We have increased the number of points for infantry elimination from two to six, and that has doubled the number of destroyed enemies in one month,” Fedorov said. “This is not just a system of motivation, this is a mechanism that changes the rules of war.”

So does any of this bother you? Drone operators, who are safely far away from the action, flying their unmanned war machines by sitting in front of a computer screen, zapping Russians from on high, like a first-person shooter computer game?

I suppose it’s often necessary in the military to dehumanize your enemies; otherwise, you might not be able to kill them. On the other hand, in the old warrior code, combatants respected their foes, honoring a worthy opponent even as they fought each other to the death.

North Korea’s Remote Worker Scam

A downside of hiring remote workers: It makes industrial espionage a lot easier, plus it funds buying weapons for Communist police states.

Politico has published an article by Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel entitled Tech companies have a big remote worker problem: North Korean operatives, with the deck, “Cybersecurity firms say that the intricate scam to amass funding for North Korea’s weapons program is happening ‘on a scale we haven’t seen before.’”

North Korean operatives are setting up fake Linked-In accounts, often involving stolen identities of actual tech experts, and are then applying for jobs at high-tech companies. They then use AI technology to deep-fake the online interview and are getting hired.

Their salaries can be as much as $300,000 a year. Some of the North Koreans take on multiple jobs to increase their earnings. “This money is directly going to the weapons program, and sometimes you see that money going to the Kim family,” [cybersecurity expert Adam] Meyers added. “We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds.”

The operatives often have American accomplices. When the company sends these remote workers specialized computers and other equipment, they are given American addresses, which route everything to “laptop farms.” Here, Americans on North Korea’s payroll keep the equipment–maybe as many as 90 computers at a time–running, so that company monitors will think the workers are using them.

If the company ever notices that an expensive hire isn’t actually producing anything and fires him, the remote worker can make further money by installing ransomware into the company networks and by stealing proprietary information.

“That North Korean IT worker has access to your whole host of web development software, all the assets that you’ve been collecting. And then that worker is being paid by you, funneled back into the North Korean state, and is conducting espionage at the same time,” [cyber intelligence analyst Alexander] Leslie said. “It imposes a significant financial and compliance risk.”

According to the article, this scam is rampant in the tech industry and other businesses hiring IT workers:

“I’ve talked to a lot of CISOs at Fortune 500 companies, and nearly every one that I’ve spoken to about the North Korean IT worker problem has admitted they’ve hired at least one North Korean IT worker, if not a dozen or a few dozen,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Google Cloud’s Mandiant, said during a recent media briefing.

One company received over a thousand applicants that turned out to be from North Korea.

Law-enforcement agents and cybersecurity firms are trying to crack down on this scam. Authorities recently busted an American for running a laptop farm that served 300 companies with fake North Korean workers.

The More Powerful AI Gets, the More It Hallucinates

We have long complained at this blog about the hallucinations of Artificial Intelligence.

Just about every time I have tried to use AI in my research–to track down a fact, a quotation, or a book–it gets something wrong. Instead of telling me that it can’t find what I was looking for, it makes something up and presents it as being true. This is called a hallucination. (See this for some examples.)

I keep hearing that the problem will go away once the technology gets better. But instead, as the technology gets better, the problem gets worse!

Tech reporter Victor Tangermann has written an article for Futurism entitled The AI Industry Has a Huge Problem: the Smarter Its AI Gets, the More It’s Hallucinating.

He says that OpenAI’s latest large-language model hallucinates 48% of the time. The previous model hallucinated a still-bad 33% of the time. That was double the rate for the earlier, more primitive models. The same pattern can be found in the competing models of Google and DeepSeek.

“As AI models become more powerful, they’re also becoming more prone to hallucinating, not less,” says Tangermann. “Worst of all, AI companies are struggling to nail down why exactly chatbots are generating more errors than before — a struggle that highlights the head-scratching fact that even AI’s creators don’t quite understand how the tech actually works.” (I’ll be blogging about that last link later.)

The big question is whether this is an intrinsic weakness of the technology that cannot be remedied. Tangermann writes,

To some experts, hallucinations may be inherent to the tech itself, making the problem practically impossible to overcome.

“Despite our best efforts, they will always hallucinate,” AI startup Vectara CEO Amr Awadallah told the NYT. “That will never go away.”

It’s such a widespread issue, there are entire companies dedicated to helping businesses overcome hallucinations.

“Not dealing with these errors properly basically eliminates the value of AI systems,” Pratik Verma, cofounder of Okahu, a consulting firm that helps businesses better make use of AI, told the NYT. . . .

In short, despite their best efforts, hallucinations have never been more widespread — and at the moment, the tech isn’t even heading in the right direction.

If you use AI, always, always, always check the results. Of course, if you have to take the time to do that, you might wonder why you bothered with AI in the first place.

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Weird Science & the New Social Imaginary

Last updated on: May 13, 2025 at 7:34 pm By Gene Veith

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Futurism is a webzine devoted to covering developments in science and technology. It is owned by Recurrent Ventures, the same outfit that runs the venerable Popular Science, so it has some credibility.

Recently, Futurism has published articles by its senior editor Victor Tangermann about scientists who claim to have found evidence for the two wildest theories being proposed to explain the anomalies they keep running up against in nature: (1) that the universe is a computer simulation; and (2) that there are an infinite number of parallel universes.

In Physicist Says He’s Identified a Clue That We’re Living in a Computer Simulation, Victor Tangermann reports on the findings and links to the research:

In a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances, University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson offered a new interpretation of gravity, arguing that it could be the result of the universe trying to make itself less cluttered, thereby behaving much like a computer algorithm.

“This is another example of data compression and computational optimization in our universe, which supports the possibility of a simulated or computational universe,” he wrote.

It turns out, Tangermann says, “Vopson’s article is part of a greater movement of scientists trying to explain the forces of nature by arguing that they’re the result of an all-encompassing simulation.”

Vopson built on his own “second law of information dynamics” proposition, which holds that the “entropy of any system remains constant or increases over time,” to argue that gravity is pulling together matter and objects in space to keep entropy at a minimum, much like a computer tidying and compressing data.

“My findings in this study fit with the thought that the universe might work like a giant computer, or our reality is a simulated construct,” said Vopson in a statement. “Just like computers try to save space and run more efficiently, the universe might be doing the same.”

“It’s a new way to think about gravity,” he added, “not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the universe is trying to stay organised.”

He sees in the “information” stored in quantum states as “a kind of pixelation of ones and zeroes.” Thus, “The process is identical to how a digital computer game, virtual reality application, or other advanced simulation would be designed.”

On the larger scale, he argues,”it appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimising mechanism in a computational process that has the role to compress information.”

UPDATE: Here is Vopson’s explanation.

Another Tangermann article in Futurism is Google Says It Appears to Have Accessed Parallel Universes:

The search giant recently unveiled a new quantum computer chip, dubbed Willow, which — on a specific benchmark, at least — the company says can outperform any supercomputer in the world.

“Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing,” Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven wrote in a blog post announcing the chip. “It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years.”

“This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe,” he argued. “It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”

Deutsch is a physicist who laid out his multiverse hypothesis in a 1997 book called “The Fabric of Reality,” in which he suggested that quantum computers’ calculations take place across multiple universes at the same time.

Now the multiverse hypothesis has a longer pedigree than the computer simulation theory and is taken more seriously by scientists. Read the Wikipedia article on Multiverse, which mentions among its advocates prominent scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking.

Wikipedia also gives away the main attraction of the theory: It gives scientists a way to evade the implications of the anthropic principle–the fact that the universe on every level is “fine-tuned” for life–which is powerful evidence for Intelligent Design and the reality of God:

The concept of other universes has been proposed to explain how our own universe appears to be fine-tuned for conscious life as we experience it.

If there were a large (possibly infinite) number of universes, each with possibly different physical laws (or different fundamental physical constants), then some of these universes (even if very few) would have the combination of laws and fundamental parameters that are suitable for the development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, stars, and planets that can exist long enough for life to emerge and evolve.

The weak anthropic principle could then be applied to conclude that we (as conscious beings) would only exist in one of those few universes that happened to be finely tuned, permitting the existence of life with developed consciousness. Thus, while the probability might be extremely small that any particular universe would have the requisite conditions for life (as we understand life), those conditions do not require intelligent design as an explanation for the conditions in the Universe that promote our existence in it.

So it appears that Science is resorting to irrational, non-verifiable, non-empirical theories to avoid “in the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”

Somehow, believing the entire universe is a computer simulation, that all reality is virtual reality, as in the Matrix movies, is more scientifically respectable than to believe that the universe was created and is constantly sustained by the Mind of God. Perhaps Prof. Vopson has some valid observations regarding the foundational function of “information” in the structure of the universe. But instead of leaping to the conclusion of a computer program, he might have seen the connection between “information” and “language”; that is to say, the “Word,” the Logos of John 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)

He might have done something about light, whose speed is the universal constant, wondering why that is and seeing its connection to this primal Logos–the root word of “logic”–that orders all existence. If he observed something about gravity acting like some kind of Artificial Intelligence that holds the universe together, making adjustments as needed, he might consider an Actual Intelligence (why doesn’t he ask who might be the Programmer be who has coded this simulation?), namely, the Son of God who “is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).

And why is it easier for scientists to believe in multiple universes, even an infinite number of universes, than to believe in an infinite God?

I know why scientists drifted away from religious explanations, unlike founders of science just as Newton and Kepler. The scientific method was to focus on empirical evidence and verifiable models. Then the notion arose, not from science itself but from philosophy about science, that the scientific method is the only way to access the only kind of truth. That reduced reality to the interactions of inert matter, excluding any kind of meaning except what can be constructed within and by the human mind.

Intellectual historians have written about how the rise of science “disenchanted” nature, leading to a “social imaginary” that could not even imagine religious assertions, leading to the rise of secularism and the eclipse of religion.

But now science is abandoning its own method and its own criteria! Swept along by the technological creations of engineers, some of them are trying to understand nature in terms of human creations. The Enlightenment scientists in the age of the industrial revolution conceived of nature as a vast machine. The post-Enlightenment scientists in the age of information technology are trying to think of it as a computer. But the computer-simulation hypothesis is non-empirical, non-verifiable, non-rational, and absurd on the face of it. And the infinite number of parallel universe hypothesis is even more so!

My point is this: a “social imaginary” that is open to the-universe-as-a-computer-simulation and infinite universes can no longer be closed to belief in God.

Illustration: The Infinite Crystal Universe 2 (teamLab Planets TOKYO) by wa_me via Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

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