Tootfinder

ConspirED: A Dataset for Cognitive Traits of Conspiracy Theories and Large Language Model Safety
Luke Bates, Max Glockner, Preslav Nakov, Iryna Gurevych
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20468

ConspirED: A Dataset for Cognitive Traits of Conspiracy Theories and Large Language Model Safety
Conspiracy theories erode public trust in science and institutions while resisting debunking by evolving and absorbing counter-evidence. As AI-generated misinformation becomes increasingly sophisticated, understanding rhetorical patterns in conspiratorial content is important for developing interventions such as targeted prebunking and assessing AI vulnerabilities. We introduce ConspirED (CONSPIR Evaluation Dataset), which captures the cognitive traits of conspiratorial ideation in multi-senten…

There's some kind of right wing conspiracy theory involving the beds from, I assume, the movie Elysium (2013)?
https://www.theverge.com/news/787042/trump-posts-then-pulls-bizarre-ai-video-promoting-medbed-conspiracy

Trump posts, then pulls bizarre AI video promoting MedBed conspiracy
Trump shared an AI-generated video in which he announced a MedBed hospital and national MedBed card.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

Closing the Safety Gap: Surgical Concept Erasure in Visual Autoregressive Models
Xinhao Zhong, Yimin Zhou, Zhiqi Zhang, Junhao Li, Yi Sun, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Ke Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22400 …

Closing the Safety Gap: Surgical Concept Erasure in Visual Autoregressive Models
The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has brought new opportunities for text-to-image generation, but also heightened safety concerns. Existing concept erasure techniques, primarily designed for diffusion models, fail to generalize to VARs due to their next-scale token prediction paradigm. In this paper, we first propose a novel VAR Erasure framework VARE that enables stable concept erasure in VAR models by leveraging auxiliary visual tokens to reduce fine-tuning intensity. B…

Schur log-concavity and the quantum Pascal triangle
\'Alvaro Guti\'errez, Christian Krattenthaler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22648 https://arxiv.or…

Schur log-concavity and the quantum Pascal triangle
We say a sequence $f_0, f_1, f_2, \ldots$ of symmetric functions is Schur log-concave if $f_n^2 - f_{n-1}f_{n+1}$ is Schur positive for all $n\ge1$. We conjecture that a very general class of sequences of Schur functions satisfies this property, and show it for sequences of Schur functions indexed by partitions with growing first part and column. Our findings are related to work of Lam, Postnikov and Pylyavskyy on Schur positivity, and of Butler, Sagan, and the second author on $q$-log-concavit…

🤪 More people believe in conspiracy theories than you might think
#survey

More people believe in conspiracy theories than you might think
Put on your tinfoil hats: New research finds that belief in conspiracy theories might be more common in the U.S. than you might think.

‘Three Days of the Condor’ At 50: A Classic Conspiracy Thriller And Whistleblower Film https://thedissenter.org/three-days-of-the-condor-at-50-a-classic-conspiracy-thriller-and-whistleblower-film/

Shabana Mahmood, the latest in the line of migrant heritage Home Secretaries to show just how tough she can be on.... migrants.
Simultaneously playing with fire (we know how this ends) and pulling up the ladder after her (meanwhile basking in privilege).
It would be better if everyone, migrants and natives had to do a bit of community service.

Shabana Mahmood to demand migrants earn right to settled status
New tests will include learning English to a high standard, paying National Insurance and not claiming benefits.

China and its media remained quiet about the TikTok deal, a notable silence as China can still decide the app's fate; Chinese social media chatter was limited (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/china-stays-conspic…

China stays conspicuously quiet after Trump’s TikTok deal declaration
U.S. President Donald Trump says that he’s received Beijing's nod on a deal that would see TikTok stay alive in the U.S.

Opening Knowledge Gaps Drives Scientific Progress
Kara Kedrick, Wenlong Yang, Thomas Gebhart, Yang Wang, Russell J. Funk
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21899 https://

Opening Knowledge Gaps Drives Scientific Progress
Knowledge production is often viewed as an endogenous process in which discovery arises through the recombination of existing theories, findings, and concepts. Yet given the vast space of potential recombinations, not all are equally valuable, and identifying those that may prove most generative remains challenging. We argue that a crucial form of recombination occurs when linking concepts creates knowledge gaps-empty regions in the conceptual landscape that focus scientific attention on proxim…