Feature Story: Too good to be true? U of R expert on disinformation honoured with membership into the Royal Society of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We can barely look at our phones, turn on our TVs, or listen to our radios without hearing about fake news. It would seem that disinformation is everywhere, all the time. Thankfully, the University of Regina’s Dr. Gordon Pennycook, a leading researcher in the psychology of disinformation, reasoning, and decision-making, is helping us get a handle on what’s true and what’s false. In fact, his research has helped reveal the underlying mechanisms of human reasoning, which has changed the way that many psychologists think about thinking, and has showed the many ways that analytic thinking impacts our everyday lives. His most recent work leverages these insights to help people to both understand and combat disinformation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.112 | 0.020 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".