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Despite widespread debunking, many psychological myths remain deeply entrenched. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) mimic human behaviour of myth belief and explores methods to mitigate such tendencies. Using 50 popular psychological myths, we evaluate myth belief across multiple LLMs under different prompting strategies, including retrieval-augmented generation and swaying prompts. Results show that LLMs exhibit significantly lower myth belief rates than humans, though user prompting can influence responses. RAG proves effective in reducing myth belief and reveals latent debiasing potential within LLMs. Our findings contribute to the emerging field of Machine Psychology and highlight how cognitive science methods can inform the evaluation and development of LLM-based systems.
Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release an expert-labeled video dataset. To scale labeling, we introduce MythTriage, an efficient triage pipeline that uses a lightweight model for routine cases and defers harder ones to a high-performing, but costlier, large language model (LLM). MythTriage achieves up to 0.86 macro F1-score while estimated to reduce annotation time and financial cost by over 76% compared to experts and full LLM labeling. We analyze 2.9K search results and 343K recommendations, uncovering how myths persist on YouTube and offering actionable insights for public health and platform moderation.
As Large Language Models become ubiquitous sources of health information, understanding their capacity to accurately represent stigmatized conditions is crucial for responsible deployment. This study examines whether leading AI systems perpetuate or challenge misconceptions about Autism Spectrum Disorder, a condition particularly vulnerable to harmful myths. We administered a 30-item instrument measuring autism knowledge to 178 participants and three state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini. Contrary to expectations that AI systems would leverage their vast training data to outperform humans, we found the opposite pattern: human participants endorsed significantly fewer myths than LLMs (36.2% vs. 44.8% error rate; z = -2.59, p = .0048). In 18 of the 30 evaluated items, humans significantly outperformed AI systems. These findings reveal a critical blind spot in current AI systems and have important implications for human-AI interaction design, the epistemology of machine knowledge, and the need to center neurodivergent perspectives in AI development.
We have selected six myths about the OSS community and have tested whether they are true or not. The purpose of this report is to identify the lessons that can be learned from the development style of the OSS community and the issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve better Employee Experience (EX) in software development within companies and organizations. The OSS community has been led by a group of skilled developers known as hackers. We have great respect for the engineers and activities of the OSS community and aim to learn from them. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that having high expectations can sometimes result in misunderstandings. When there are excessive expectations and concerns, misunderstandings (referred to as myths) can arise, particularly when individuals who are not practitioners rely on hearsay to understand the practices of practitioners. We selected the myths to be tested based on a literature review and interviews. These myths are held by software development managers and customers who are not direct participants in the OSS community. We answered questions about each myth through: 1) Our own analysis of repository data, 2) A liter
Fluid antenna systems (FAS) represent a paradigm shift in which antenna elements (ports) emulate the illusion of motion or fluidity within a spatial aperture to optimize performance. One of FAS's key use cases is the provision of open-loop fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA), enabling multiplexing gains through spatial interference nulling without requiring channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. However, this comes at the price of requiring a precise channel reconstruction at the receiver to successfully identify the optimal port. Current research efforts map this sensing task to a legacy MIMO-style estimation problem focused on minimizing global reconstruction errors such as normalized mean-squared error (NMSE). In this work, we argue that because FAS is inherently selection-based, NMSE-like approaches often lead to excessive training overhead and reduced net throughput. We revisit the problem of channel estimation and reconstruction in FAS, challenging some prevalent myths related to (i) the adequacy of global error metrics; (ii) the convenience of reconstructing channels or aggregate interference; (iii) the need for spatial oversampling; and (iv) the impact of
Cancer patients are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) for medical information, making it critical to assess how well these models handle complex, personalized questions. However, current medical benchmarks focus on medical exams or consumer-searched questions and do not evaluate LLMs on real patient questions with patient details. In this paper, we first have three hematology-oncology physicians evaluate cancer-related questions drawn from real patients. While LLM responses are generally accurate, the models frequently fail to recognize or address false presuppositions in the questions, posing risks to safe medical decision-making. To study this limitation systematically, we introduce Cancer-Myth, an expert-verified adversarial dataset of 585 cancer-related questions with false presuppositions. On this benchmark, no frontier LLM -- including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and Claude-4-Sonnet -- corrects these false presuppositions more than $43\%$ of the time. To study mitigation strategies, we further construct a 150-question Cancer-Myth-NFP set, in which physicians confirm the absence of false presuppositions. We find typical mitigation strategies, such as adding preca
We present seven myths commonly believed to be true in machine learning research, circa Feb 2019. This is an archival copy of the blog post at https://crazyoscarchang.github.io/2019/02/16/seven-myths-in-machine-learning-research/ Myth 1: TensorFlow is a Tensor manipulation library Myth 2: Image datasets are representative of real images found in the wild Myth 3: Machine Learning researchers do not use the test set for validation Myth 4: Every datapoint is used in training a neural network Myth 5: We need (batch) normalization to train very deep residual networks Myth 6: Attention $>$ Convolution Myth 7: Saliency maps are robust ways to interpret neural networks
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) is attracting growing interest, driven by practical constraints in real-world applications, the complexity of LLM-RL infrastructure, and the need for further innovations of RL methodologies. While classic REINFORCE and its modern variants like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) are typically regarded as on-policy algorithms with limited tolerance of off-policyness, we present in this work a first-principles derivation for group-relative REINFORCE -- a REINFORCE variant that uses the within-group mean reward as the baseline for advantage calculation -- without assuming a specific training data distribution, showing that it admits a native off-policy interpretation. This perspective yields two general principles for adapting REINFORCE to truly off-policy settings: regularizing policy updates, and actively shaping the data distribution. Our analysis demystifies some myths about the roles of importance sampling and clipping in GRPO, unifies and reinterprets two recent algorithms -- Online Policy Mirror Descent and Asymmetric REINFORCE -- as regularized forms of the REINFORCE loss, and offers theoretical just
In this thought-provoking article, we discuss certain myths and legends that are folklore among members of the high-performance computing community. We gathered these myths from conversations at conferences and meetings, product advertisements, papers, and other communications such as tweets, blogs, and news articles within and beyond our community. We believe they represent the zeitgeist of the current era of massive change, driven by the end of many scaling laws such as Dennard scaling and Moore's law. While some laws end, new directions are emerging, such as algorithmic scaling or novel architecture research. Nevertheless, these myths are rarely based on scientific facts, but rather on some evidence or argumentation. In fact, we believe that this is the very reason for the existence of many myths and why they cannot be answered clearly. While it feels like there should be clear answers for each, some may remain endless philosophical debates, such as whether Beethoven was better than Mozart. We would like to see our collection of myths as a discussion of possible new directions for research and industry investment.
Every year, millions of functional systems become e-waste because users are pressured to send their systems to landfills due to a lack of vendor support and difficulty in recycling. Vendors cite ``cybersecurity'' as the driver for short product support periods, leading to a prevalent, but uninterrogated, belief that cybersecurity and environmental sustainability are fundamentally contradictory; i.e., it is difficult, if not impossible, to build products that are secure, long-lasting, and reusable. To understand the nuanced relationship between security and sustainability, we systematically analyze 29 papers and distill 155 sustainability guidelines into 12 sustainability themes. These themes enable us to compare the sustainable HCI and sustainable software engineering guidance with that of cybersecurity, identifying points of alignment and tension. We find little evidence of a fundamental tension between these two domains; the few instances of tension can be mitigated through thoughtful consideration of security and sustainability objectives. We also find that sustainability, like usable security, struggles with the myth of users as the weakest link and the individualization of res
In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen, a world expert on autism, diagnosed Einstein posthumously with Asperger's syndrome. I think we cannot diagnose a dead person. Historians of science have fiercely objected to this trend of diagnosing deceased scientists by reconstructing from scant evidence, calling these diagnoses myths. Despite the historians' efforts at demolishing myths, Einstein has been constantly diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. I will stick my neck out and suggest in this paper that although historians' critique of Baron-Cohen and others includes debunking myths, it piggybacks on another myth that uses the following metaphors: a dull and socially adept Einstein who worked at Zurich, Prague, Berlin, and Princeton, an industrious scientist who earned his living through his work as a professor at the university; he had a special gift of friendship and collegiality, and he was deeply embedded in the academic community. These explanations do not make sense from the perspective of Einstein sitting in his office at Princeton, let alone Einstein sitting in the patent office. This perhaps explains the tendency of people to find counterclaims and myths more persuasive than historians' ex
The rapid dissemination of misinformation on the internet complicates the decision-making process for individuals seeking reliable information, particularly parents researching child development topics. This misinformation can lead to adverse consequences, such as inappropriate treatment of children based on myths. While previous research has utilized text-mining techniques to predict child abuse cases, there has been a gap in the analysis of child development myths and facts. This study addresses this gap by applying text mining techniques and classification models to distinguish between myths and facts about child development, leveraging newly gathered data from publicly available websites. The research methodology involved several stages. First, text mining techniques were employed to pre-process the data, ensuring enhanced accuracy. Subsequently, the structured data was analysed using six robust Machine Learning (ML) classifiers and one Deep Learning (DL) model, with two feature extraction techniques applied to assess their performance across three different training-testing splits. To ensure the reliability of the results, cross-validation was performed using both k-fold and l
Low-resource countries represent over 90% of maternal deaths, with Pakistan among the top four countries contributing nearly half in 2023. Since these deaths are mostly preventable, large language models (LLMs) can help address this crisis by automating health communication and risk assessment. However, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) communication in conservative contexts often relies on indirect language that obscures meaning, complicating LLM-based interventions. We conduct a two-stage study in Pakistan: (1) analyzing data from clinical observations, interviews, and focus groups with clinicians and patients, and (2) evaluating the interpretive capabilities of five popular LLMs on this data. Our analysis identifies two axes of communication (referential domain and expression approach) and shows LLMs struggle with semantic drift, myths, and polysemy in clinical interactions. We contribute: (1) empirical themes in SRH communication, (2) a categorization framework for indirect communication, (3) evaluation of LLM performance, and (4) design recommendations for culturally-situated SRH communication.
Many recent FPGA-based Processor-in-Memory (PIM) architectures have appeared with promises of impressive levels of parallelism but with performance that falls short of expectations due to reduced maximum clock frequencies, an inability to scale processing elements up to the maximum BRAM capacity, and minimal hardware support for large reduction operations. In this paper, we first establish what we believe should be a "Gold Standard" set of design objectives for PIM-based FPGA designs. This Gold Standard was established to serve as an absolute metric for comparing PIMs developed on different technology nodes and vendor families as well as an aspirational goal for designers. We then present IMAGine, an In-Memory Accelerated GEMV engine used as a case study to show the Gold Standard can be realized in practice. IMAGine serves as an existence proof that dispels several myths surrounding what is normally accepted as clocking and scaling FPGA performance limitations. Specifically, IMAGine clocks at the maximum frequency of the BRAM and scales to 100% of the available BRAMs. Comparative analyses are presented showing execution speeds over existing PIM-based GEMV engines on FPGAs and achie
It is very common to introduce quantum physics in an historical context. Though there are advantages to this, it is a problem that many of the stories that have become central to the physics lore are mere pseudo-histories far detached from the real events. It is about time that we stop uncritically copying these stories and instead make an effort to present the development of quantum physics as it actually was. This paper deals with one of the most common myths in quantum history, the one about the ultraviolet catastrophe and how it motivated Planck's introduction of quantum physics. On closer inspection it turns out this story has the time-line completely turned on its head. The ultraviolet catastrophe was first discussed several years after Planck published his radiation law so it played no role in his motivation. Instead Planck was concerned with finding a theoretical derivation of the law for blackbody radiation. This law was first thought to be Wien's radiation law, but when new data disagreed, Planck came up with his own law that fitted the data. Planck's radiation law first came about as an elaborate fit to data and to derive it he found no other way than to use statistical
Recently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have made significant advances across various fields. One of the most popular research areas involves applying these agents to video games. Traditionally, these methods have relied on game APIs to access in-game environmental and action data. However, this approach is limited by the availability of APIs and does not reflect how humans play games. With the advent of vision language models (VLMs), agents now have enhanced visual understanding capabilities, enabling them to interact with games using only visual inputs. Despite these advances, current approaches still face challenges in action-oriented tasks, particularly in action role-playing games (ARPGs), where reinforcement learning methods are prevalent but suffer from poor generalization and require extensive training. To address these limitations, we select an ARPG, ``Black Myth: Wukong'', as a research platform to explore the capability boundaries of existing VLMs in scenarios requiring visual-only input and complex action output. We define 12 tasks within the game, with 75% focusing on combat, and incorporate several state-of-the-art VLMs into this benchmark. Additionally, we
The hypothesis of conscious machines has been debated since the invention of the notion of artificial intelligence, powered by the assumption that the computational intelligence achieved by a system is the cause of the emergence of phenomenal consciousness in that system as an epiphenomenon or as a consequence of the behavioral or internal complexity of the system surpassing some threshold. As a consequence, a huge amount of literature exploring the possibility of machine consciousness and how to implement it on a computer has been published. Moreover, common folk psychology and transhumanism literature has fed this hypothesis with the popularity of science fiction literature, where intelligent robots are usually antropomorphized and hence given phenomenal consciousness. However, in this work, we argue how these literature lacks scientific rigour, being impossible to falsify the opposite hypothesis, and illustrate a list of arguments that show how every approach that the machine consciousness literature has published depends on philosophical assumptions that cannot be proven by the scientific method. Concretely, we also show how phenomenal consciousness is not computable, independe
There is a popular myth transferred from generation to generation related to the festivity of the Valencian Fallas. During these days, it is traditional to throw pyrotechnic devices of all kinds. There is a legend about the so-called drunk fireworks, small rockets that move randomly at high speed. According to folk wisdom, if you try to run away from a drunk firework, it will chase you until it hits you. It is performed a Monte Carlo simulation without considering aerodynamic effects to see if there is indeed a greater chance of a person being hit when moving. The results indicate that the popular myth is correct, at least in terms of having a higher probability of impact. Once again, it is demonstrated that popular myths can be a source of valuable knowledge beyond formal science.
The experiment performed by Henry Cavendish to measure the density of the earth, is in numerous textbooks described as a measurement of the universal gravitational constant, G, even if we know that this was not true. In this paper, a study on how common this "myth" is based on the checklist developed by Leite on a total of 84 textbooks. The prevalence of the myth in most textbooks throughout the 20th century indicates a focus on the contemporary interests of authors and the physics community in presenting the development of physics. An explanation of the prevalence of the myth and a different approach
One of the oldest and most enduring myths in human history is the belief that the Parthenon was cleverly designed with various curved structures and sizes in order to correct optical illusions, and therefore appear straight and regular. The myth has its origin in the writings of Vitruvius more than 2,000 years ago and was renewed in the nineteenth century when curved profiles were carefully measured. At least twelve different \textit{optical corrections} have been proposed, all following the same basic principle. The myth is still widely acknowledged as an obvious truth despite a complete absence of historical or scientific evidence. This paper analyzes these corrections scientifically and demonstrates that the illusions they are supposed to correct are either non-existent or so small as to be imperceptible.