8 September 2026
The Weekly Slice № 001
Welcome to The Weekly Slice, baloney lovers, from baloney.ai, The Truth Deli!
On the counter today: two claims cut from the same aged block of twentieth-century science, one from the clinic and one from the launchpad, both kept in circulation long past the point where anyone still asks where they came from. Five frontier models took each one separately, and the slices are below.
Still hungry after that, there is something longer at the back: "Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life", by Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, published by the RAND Corporation.
This week’s baloney
Food for thought
Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life
RAND Corporation · Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich · ~60 min · intermediate
Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich set out to name the thing everyone gestures at vaguely: they split it into four trends — more disagreement about facts and about how to read data, a blurring line between opinion and fact, more opinion by volume and influence, and falling trust in the institutions that used to supply the facts. Worth reading as a framework, if only to argue with the categories. Two caveats we'd print in the same size type: much RAND work is funded by government or private contract, so check the sponsor line first, and policy analysis interprets well past its primary data. That's allowed. It's just not measurement.
Worth knowing about the source. A large share of RAND output is funded by government or private contract. The sponsor is disclosed per report and should be read before the findings. Policy analysis also involves interpretation that reaches beyond the primary data — legitimate, but a different kind of claim than a measurement, and worth naming as such to readers.
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