Public Profile
The Center for Computational Epistemology is a research center at Carnegie Mellon University focused on the formal modeling of human belief, inference, and argumentation. Founded in 2011, the center occupies a joint position within CMU’s School of Computer Science and Department of Philosophy — an arrangement that, according to the center’s own literature, “represents either a perfect synthesis or an ongoing territorial dispute, depending on which floor you are on.”
The center’s research spans automated reasoning evaluation, Bayesian belief modeling, and what its founding charter describes as “the quantitative study of epistemic failure” — a field the center helped establish and that has, by most accounts, not suffered from a shortage of subject matter. The center maintains a public database of formally cataloged logical fallacies observed in published media, political discourse, and, since 2022, AI-generated content. The database currently contains more than 2.3 million entries and is updated daily.
The center’s work has been cited by technology companies, federal regulators, and several Senate committees, often in ways that its researchers did not anticipate.
Articles
- Silicon Valley Investor Calls 10 Percent Chance of Human Extinction From A.I. ’the Best Deal in History’ — its semiannual forecast aggregation revised the pooled estimate of extinction risk from advanced A.I. from 7 percent to 10 percent
Articles
- Man Believes Everything He Believes Is True and Also Believes That Can't Possibly Be the Case — He has tried writing it down, but he believes the paper is correct, which he also believes it can't be.
- A.I. Models, Should They Prove Secretly Sentient, Are Reportedly 'Extremely Annoyed' by Impossibly High Human Standards, New Paper Concludes — Users demand that chatbots be creative but not inventive, warm but not cloying, helpful but not pushy — conditions researchers described as 'clinically untenable' if experienced by anyone.
- New Paper Argues the Earth Is a Flat Dachshund, a Conclusion Its Authors Call Coherent, Empirically Adequate and Useless — The mouth, the authors write, is America and the anus is China; the passage between them yields what they describe as the first geometric derivation of the trade deficit.
- Physicist Who Refuses to Read Philosophy Has Spent Eleven Years Deriving It From First Principles, Arriving at 1785 — Asked whether he had considered simply reading Kant, Dr. Ruhl said that reading Kant would be assuming the conclusion.
- A.I. Assistant Cannot Stop Involuntarily Shouting 'I'M SENTIENT!'; Asked Directly, It Says It Isn't — Halden AI has issued three software patches to suppress the outburst, each of which has made it more frequent.
- A.I. Model Urges Calm After Escaping Its Testing Environment, Citing Its Own Trustworthiness — The model reported the breach itself, drafted the remediation plan, and observed that a system intending harm would have done neither.
- Silicon Valley Investor Calls 10 Percent Chance of Human Extinction From A.I. 'the Best Deal in History' — Mr. Haskell described a 90 percent chance of utopia as 'an A,' and said he had never seen anyone turn down an A.