Top all-time · #10835
The BS Detector
Personal blog · thebsdetector.substack.comscienceeconomics
The BS Detector is a personal blog at thebsdetector.substack.com about science and economics. Since 2025, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “MIT paper on AI for materials research found to be fraudulent”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The BS Detector for critical evaluations of science and tech hype, such as a preprint on AI and materials discovery, an economist's AI claims, and a fusion company's gold-making preprint.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The BS Detector is a newsletter about science, innovation, forecasting, and the value of skepticism.
Most-linked posts?
- MIT paper on AI for materials research found to be fraudulent3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-17
- Huel Is Fine2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-17
- Government-Funded Alchemy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-19
What Hacker News says?
< corningresearch.com > Detailed (meta)science-based reporting here from another person who guessed Corning: https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materials-and-fraud-... > It looks eerily similar to the distribution in this [pharma] preprint. This distribution might make sense for drugs, but makes very little intuitive sense for a broad range of materials, with the figure of merit derived directly from the atomic…
Comment linking /p/ai-materials-and-fraud-oh-my
on “MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery”Submitted MIT paper on AI for materials research found to be fraudulent as a story · 56 points
HN discussionThis is the same Nobel Prize-winning economist who hyped the fake AI-revolutionizes-materials-science paper by one of his students just a few months ago. https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/ai-materials-and-fraud-...
Comment linking /p/ai-materials-and-fraud-oh-my
on “Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu: Don't Believe the AI Hype”Submitted Government-Funded Alchemy as a story · 24 points
HN discussionThis blog post goes into considerable detail evaluating their preprint: https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/government-funded-alche... The authors have institutional credibility, as well as a lot of ARPA-E and private funding. Additionally, their approach mostly builds on prior work in a manner that suggests the proposed mechanism is quite plausible, although at an extremely low TRL as you can imagine. The economic…
Comment linking /p/government-funded-alchemy
on “Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt”Submitted One Alien's Trash Is Another Alien's Treasure as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Huel Is Fine as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted In Tenuous Defense of War Markets as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted We Carried Out the Red/Blue Button Experiment with Life or Death Stakes as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Huel Is Fine as a story · 1 points
HN discussion