February 2023

How should we per­ceive the new gen­er­a­tion of AI sys­tems, what to expect of them, and how will they change us? Scott Aaronson, an AI secu­ri­ty spe­cial­ist, talked about this in an inter­view to Sergei Nemalevich, a sci­ence jour­nal­ist of Radio Liberty. It’s a good start­ing point for those who have not yet real­ized how seri­ous things are. 

According to the new Cochrane meta-analy­sis, the effec­tive­ness of masks against the spread of res­pi­ra­to­ry infec­tions has not yet been proven. However, they assess the reli­a­bil­i­ty of this con­clu­sion is low because the avail­able research is incon­clu­sive. Science jour­nal­ist Ira Yakutenko explained in detail why this is the case. We can argue there until the prop­er research arrives.

Machine trans­la­tion The oth­er day it turned out, accord­ing to the Club of Academicians “July 1”, that in December 2022 the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences decid­ed «to trans­fer the func­tions of the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience and the RAS Commission on Counteraction to Falsification of Scientific Research to the Expert Council of the RAS». The lead­ers of the com­mis­sions were not even informed about this. In 2018, the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience was split into two, severe­ly lim­it­ing the right to pub­lic state­ments (only with the approval of the Presidium of the RAS). Now