CONCEPT
The Demarcation Problem
Popper's foundational question — how to distinguish genuine science from pseudoscience — now reapplied to the novel problem of distinguishing tested knowledge from plausible fabrication in the output of systems that produce both with equal confidence.
Popper's original demarcation problem asked how to draw the line between genuine science and pseudoscience. His answer was falsifiability: a theory is scientific if it specifies the conditions under which it would be wrong. Eighty years later, the problem has found its most consequential new application. The question is no longer how to distinguish science from pseudoscience but how to distinguish genuine insight from plausible fabrication in the output of AI systems that produce both with identical surface quality. The traditional markers professionals have used for generations to evaluate reliability — prose quality, logical structure, appropriate citation, confident tone — have been decoupled from the quality they were supposed to indicate. Good prose no longer requires understanding. The heuristics are broken, and the replacement heuristics have not yet been widely developed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The original problem was empirical: Popper looked at Marxism, Freudianism, and Adlerian psychology and asked what distinguished