fact-checking on S Anand

Add a Verify Button

Sat, 30 May 2026 11:39:10 +0800

Rohit Saran looked at the Statoistics cards my AI agents are generating for The Times of India, and asked about a small button under each one.

In the list of Statoistics that you had put, I saw there’s a button called ‘Verify.’ What was that meant to be or will do in future?

That verify button explains the claim, mentions the sources, and shows how to check the claim.

One card said “9 in 10 Indians want a family doctor and barely 1 in 35 has one”. The button breaks that down:

“87% want a family doctor, 2.8% outpatient visits were to an Asha worker…”
It identifies in the source document what are the columns that we were looking at, what numbers it verified.
It links to the program that it wrote to do the verification.

I said, “it lets humans check if the numbers are right - by giving them steps – where exactly to check, how to check if it is correct.”

Sajeev pushed back: “It’s more ’explain’ than ‘verify’ really.”

True. Saurabh had asked for exactly this earlier: while a person is checking by hand, give them something that shows how the AI got to its answer. A verify button’s first job is not to prove the AI is right. It’s to let a nervous journalist check, cheaply, until they stop being nervous.

This instinct is old. The Royal Society took nullius in verba as its motto around 1662, “take nobody’s word for it.” They didn’t print claims and ask you to trust the author. In 1663 they made Robert Hooke their Curator of Experiments, whose job was to re-run the demonstration in front of the Fellows. A verify button is that, without Hooke.

(Merchants got there two centuries earlier: double-entry bookkeeping, codified by Pacioli in 1494, means every entry has a counter-entry and the books either balance or they don’t.)

Rohit’s reason for liking it went somewhere I hadn’t fully thought through. He went to brand.

It’s like why a product with 10-year guarantee is likely to be made better than a product with 2-year warranty, because the company has confidence to tell the customer, ‘Look, I am standing behind this product for 10 years.’

And later:

Any brand that is saying, ‘Whatever I write is verifiable,’ is so much more in this age of misinformation.

His version of why this matters for a newspaper: “a brand is only about trust. Rest is news is anyway a commodity.” A verify button is a public claim that you’re willing to be checked.

Here’s how I actually build one “Verify” buttons, in increasing order of effort.

Link plus a searchable string. A hyperlink may still be wrong. I want a link and a short quote I can paste into the page’s search box and find. “When I click on that link, I should be able to literally search for and find that piece of text, verifying that it did not hallucinate” Then even a plain program (not even an LLM) can open every link and confirm the text is there.
For numbers, the SQL query. If it’s data, the SQL query (or Python script) that fetches that particular result is the closest equivalent. The button should just run the query against live data and shows the number. The user doesn’t need to know SQL - they just see that the number matches.
The procedure as a checklist. The button breaks the card into steps: this is the claim, this is the number, this is the column it came from, check that the D1A value matches. A person ticks down it.
Verify with an AI agent. Add a link that opens the claim in Google AI mode with a pre-filled prompt asking it to fact-check the claim. For example: Fact-check with step-by-step evidence: According to Citizen Survey 2022-23, 87% of Indians want a dedicated family doctor but only 2.8% actually use one. How might it have changed since the publication?

Rohit framed verification as three jobs, not one: “Verification has sourcing, verification, and updation.” The last clause lets you also ask whether the number has gone stale since you published it.

Getting the source right is not the same as getting the conclusion right. Rohit said: “you are asking AI not only to get right source and right data, but now we are asking to interpret.” And interpretation is subjective on both ends. The button can confirm the number is real but not prove the argument is sound.

Of course, the sources could be wrong. “Check the source” assumes good data quality. Luckily, data is more often right than wrong, and verification can shine a light on bad data.

We can start simple. The cheapest version: every AI output has a “Verify” link to a search query the user can easily inspect. That changes their question from “can I trust this?” to “let me check.”

If this can establish trust and a brand for India’s largest newspaper, enterprises AI apps might do well to follow.

Verifying Textbook Facts

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:36:50 +0530

Using LLMs to find errors is fairly hallucination-proof.

If they mess up, it’s just wasted effort. If they don’t, they’ve uncovered a major problem!

Varun fact-checked Themes in Indian History, the official NCERT Class 12 textbook.

Page-by-page, he asked Gemini to:

Extract each claim. E.g. “Clay was locally available to the Harappans” on page 12.
Search online for the claim. E.g. ASI site description and by Encyclopedia Britannica.
Fact-check each claim. E.g. “Clay was locally available to the Harappans” is confirmed by both sources.

Here is his analysis and verifier code.

Before hitting rate limits, he scanned 56 pages and fact checked 45 claims from a dozen pages (detailed report). Even among this small sample, there was an interesting error on Page 22:

Only broken or useless objects would have been thrown away.

In reality, migrants abandon useful objects and ritual deposits give us intact, useful objects.

So, is this an error in the textbook worth correcting? Maybe. Worth exploring.

BTW, the original analysis hallucinated sources: “Discard and Reuse in the Ancient Near East” and “Recycling in the Bronze Age” from Cambridge. But for fact-checking, this doesn’t matter. The point is to flag questionable claims for further review.

There are others:

Did R.E.M. Wheeler take over as Director-General of the Archeological Survey of India in 1944 (according to the book) or in 1940 (according to other sources)? Worth checking the ASI records?
[Ashoka’s army was] 600,000 foot-soldiers, 30,000 cavalry and 9,000 elephants? The book says “some historians consider these accounts to be exaggerated” but the consensus is that these are almost certainly exaggerated. Worth rewording?

If LLMs find half a dozen questionable claims from a dozen pages, fact-checking textbooks seems an effective use for LLMs.

Especially when 25 million students read them every year.

I have personally suffered from errors in history textbooks.

I wrote my class 9 history exam in 1989-90. The Hindu published a series titled “This Day That Age” with news from 50 years ago. That morning’s was that Germany invaded Poland with Russian aid. I proudly wrote this in my exam and lost a mark, since the history textbook clearly mentioned that Russia opposed Germany.

(That I feel indignant 36 years later tells you how sorry my life is.)

New ways of reading books

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:03:07 +0800

I’m using AI to read books by:

Summarizing. This tells me what the books is about, the key points it makes and the main takeaways. It also helps me decide if I want to dig deeper.
Fact-checking. I can find mistakes, alternate perspectives, and biases. That’s a huge win!
Re-authoring. I can write it in the style of Malcolm Gladwell, Randall Munroe, Richard Feynman, or anyone else I like. Makes dense prose much more enjoyable.

So far, I’ve applied this at different levels - and I’m sure there are more possibilities:

A book. I can summarize & fact-check books like How Not To Die and learn what’s really established.
A chapter. I can turn each chapter of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table into a Randall Munroe article that makes me laugh.
A sentence. I can take a single proverb like 忙しいほど幸せ or a Kural like அடக்கம் அமரருள் உய்க்கும் and turn it into an essay that makes me cry.
Multiple books. I can compare and fact-check multiple books on the same topic, e.g. Make It Stick, A Mind for Numbers, Ultralearning, and How to Take Smart Notes.

But I suspect this is just the beginning. AI opens up many more reading styles. For example:

Reviews over time. Could we read Lolita along with the 1950s interpretation, the 1970s feminist critique, the postcolonial turn, the contemporary reassessment? Understanding how meaning evolves over time?
Character story. Reading just the sub-novel of a single character, e.g. Hoid across the Cosmere?
AMA with the author. Interpret what the author might have meant or said, e.g. What caused the quake in Arelon?

We should be mindful that artistry is not understanding. Assessing, teaching, applying, debating, … these are better tests. But accessibility, enjoyment, and novelty are meaningful too. Let’s go exploring!

I count AI summarized books as "Read"

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:54:41 +0000

I have this nagging feeling (maybe you do too?) that it’s cheating and I’m not really learning if it’s so easy. The same voice makes me feel guilty when using coding agents to code or ChatGPT in meetings.

I’m telling that voice to relax.

I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with.

I read books for pleasure, learning, and implementing.

That last bit is key, but the bottleneck isn’t the book. It’s me: how much I can absorb, retain, and act on. From what I can tell, between reading 300 pages vs 10, there’s not much difference.

The pleasure is intact

I worried I’d lose the emotional jolt – those mind-blown moments that make reading feel worth it. For science and self-help books, I haven’t.

For example, take this summary excerpt of How Minds Change

The irony is almost too perfect. To change someone’s mind, you have to stop trying to change their mind. You have to start by trying to understand it.
And when you do that—really do that—something unexpected happens. Sometimes their mind changes. And sometimes, if you’re honest with yourself, yours does too.

That blew my mind for a good 10 minutes.

Or, from Ants:

Think of a leafcutter ant colony as a high-tech Fungus Farm. There are four main players in this system: two are partners, one is a bodyguard, and one is a villain.

I loved the villain part!

There’s a learning bonus: fact-checking

When I ask Claude to fact-check the book while summarizing, I learn beyond the book. For example, I learnt that, among these longevity books:

Lifespan is largely rubbish.
The Telomere Effect has a decent core but builds fancy castles on shaky foundations.
Outlive is more careful with its claims, though less ambitious.

I learned this during the reading, not months later when some podcast corrected me.

You can also just… ask questions.

While reading Ants, “OK, aren’t most species superorganisms then? If yes, what’s the big deal?”
While reading The Cancer Code, “Why are free radicals produced? Give me examples. Are they always oxygen molecules that lack electrons? ELI15.”

The book doesn’t do that. The summary can. (I’m loving the ELI15 responses, BTW.)

I can read inaccessible books

I can now read Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil (a script I read quite slowly). Or Gitanjali, The Iliad, Dream of the Red Chamber, or more.

It’s not just language. I can read boring or intimidating books. On Growth and Form. The Road to Reality. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Brilliant but unapproachable.

Heck, I managed to read Ants after 30 years!

Sometimes the very first line of a summary hooks me so hard I can’t stop reading. That’s a strange thing to admit about a summary. But there it is.

I haven’t figured it out fully

I would read Brandon Sanderson or Jeffrey Archer this way yet. The point is the experience itself: the slow unfolding, the surprise, the voice in your ear. They write in a style I like. Why summarize that?

Biographies are trickier. The Choice’s summary made me cry. So, I do want to read The Choice in original - and the summary helped me prioritize it.

Histories? I’m not sure. Manga? No way.

I’m logging these on Goodreads as “read”. I don’t know if that’s kosher. The voice in my head has opinions. But I’m learning things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, from books I wouldn’t have finished or started, with the same pleasure and actionability.

Maybe that’s cheating. But maybe the rules of our game have changed, and I haven’t learned them yet.

Update: 31 Dec 2025. Here are the books I read this year via AI summaries, along with links to the Claude summaries.

Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá Claude
The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke Claude
Noise by Daniel Kahnemann Claude
How to Change by Katy Milkman Claude
Lifespan by David Sinclair and The Telomere EFfect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Outlive by Peter Attia. Claude
How Minds Change by David McRaney Claude
The Obesity Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Cancer Code by Jason Fung Claude
The Ants by Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson Claude
Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel Claude
Behave by Robert Sapolsky Claude
The Choice by Edith Eva Eger Claude
How Not To Die by Michael Greger Claude
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker Claude
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Claude
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes Claude
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer Claude Gemini
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould Claude
The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins Claude
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk Claude
The Culture Map by Erin Meyer Claude
Outcomes over Output by Josh Seiden Claude
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli Claude
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Claude
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan Claude
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel Claude
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Claude
Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig Claude
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Claude
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker Claude
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan Claude
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Claude
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran Claude
Small Wins Every Day: 100 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Life and Health by Luke Coutinho Claude
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran Claude

Update: 11 Apr 2026. I started adding this follow-up prompt:

Based on what you know of me, what are the things I should learn from these books? What might I do differently? Why? How?

Based on past conversations, AI knows me. For example, here were Claude’s thoughts:

Anand wants personalized life lessons from these books, filtered through what I know about him. Let me think about what I know:

Chief Innovation Officer at Straive, AI strategy, enterprise consulting

Faculty at IIT Madras, teaching Tools in Data Science to large cohort

Based in Singapore, Indian origins

Blogs daily at s-anand.net about AI experiments

Interests: data visualization, behavioral science, cross-domain pattern recognition, design

IIM Bangalore alumnus

Regular speaker at conferences

Core intellectual commitments: judgment and taste as scarce resource; verifiable/auditable AI outputs; Jevons Paradox applied to knowledge work; production costs collapsing shifts bottleneck to curation

Thinks in systems, economic, and forecasting frameworks with superforecaster-style probabilistic reasoning

Identifies as “LLM Psychologist”

Teaching an AI workshop for senior IAS officers at LBSNAA

That leads to high quality ideas. For example, it told me:

… you’re surrounded by people optimizing for the marathon — the visible, bounded deliverable. But Pheidippides’ actual run — the slow, unglamorous, unsexy one that actually won the war — was the one nobody watched.

What’s the Spartathlon version of your work? Probably: the long, patient work of changing how a client organization thinks, not just what tools it uses.

… make sure you’re spending some deliberate effort on it, even when there’s no one watching and no milestone presentation scheduled.

That led me to review transcripts for AI adoption impact. Answer: workshops help AI adoption most. I’m keeping an AI experiments list handy for impromptu workshops.

That’s real impact. In less time than I’d have taken to read a book.

Sure, I didn’t get what the books had to offer. I didn’t struggle. But I did get personalized value.

Misconceptions spread by textbooks

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Misconceptions spread by textbooks. This site lists the facts, contrary to what most textbooks say about them.

Facts:

The ocean is blue because water is a blue substance. Not because it reflects the blue sky.

The sky is blue because air is blue.

Clouds actually remain aloft because they are warm inside.

Snopes on TV

Tue, 22 Jan 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Snopes is soon to be on TV.

The bunk stops here

Wed, 07 Nov 2001 12:00:00 +0000

A portal of urban legends. The bunk stops here.

Some rumours are true

Fri, 21 Sep 2001 12:00:00 +0000

On second thoughts, some rumours are true.

Urban legends

Tue, 18 Sep 2001 12:00:00 +0000

No updates till the weekend. I’m in Bangalore. In the meantime, remember not to trust anything that’s forwarded to you. It’s likely to be an urban legend.

Inverness

Sun, 05 Nov 2000 12:00:00 +0000

The next stop was Inverness. I didn’t know Inverness had any history to it. It wasn’t till we got there that I learnt that the Inverness castle was where Macbeth (of Shakespearean fame) ruled from. In fact, it turns out that Macbeth was a really nice king. There was this barbarian who fought him, lost, and turned to the English for help – who of course were delighted, and they killed Macbeth. This barbarian stupidly signed a document saying that Scotland would pay tributes to England, and that’s been the source of all the trouble.

The other thing to see, of course, was the famous Loch Ness monstor, or Nessie as the locals like to call it. We made one mistake, though. We landed there on a Sunday. As we got off the bus, we learnt that no tours operate on Sundays. The tourist information center was closed. I wanted to buy batteries for my camera, and the shops were largely closed. The only practical thing that was open was MacDonald’s, so we picked up a meal.

Fortunately, a guy called Tony Harmsworth came along on his van. He conducts guided tours to the Loch Ness, so we hopped on with about 8 others. Tony was apparantly involved with the Loch Ness centre since its founding, and had in fact headed it. So he was very knowledgeable about the history of the monstor.

Loch Ness in itself is beautiful. It’s a huge lake, very calm, and apparantly very deep. On one end is the sea. On the other end is the Urquhart castle. It’s a stone castle that was destroyed by the Jacobites (who had the habit of destroying everything they saw, actually). I have a sneaking suspicion Tolkien borrowed quite a bit of inspiration from the Loch Ness and the Urquhart castle. It could well be the remnants of Isengard – or the fort of the Uruk-Hai orcs.

The monster itself, of course, is just a myth. The local folks always thought there was a large fish in the waters. In 1933, Mrs. McRoy saw something large – about 6 to 9 feet – that she thought was a whale. Journalists caught on, and blew it up to a monstor. A Mrs. and Mr. Spicer claimed to have seen a snake-like monstor walking past the road. (We drove past this spot.) A vet student told his mother that he broke his bike because he fell off in surprise when he saw a dinosaur-like creature. Since he was a vet student, journalists believed him. A famous reporter found hippo pugmarks. In the end, it turned out to be a hoax using his hippo foot-shaped ash tray. Then this reporter rigs a photograph that looks like a dinosaur peeping out of the lake. That’s a hoax too, using a toy submarine and a piece of cardboard. Many of the other ‘monstor’ photographs turned out to be fakes – in one case, a labrador fetching a piece of stick (see if you can spot the face of the dog). In the 1987, operation Deep Scan searched the whole lake, and found 3 suspiciously large living objects, but they were no where near large enough to be a monstor. Sure, there’s probably some big fish down there, though.

The rest of the evening was at a local pub with some loud music on. Then we hopped on to the bus, reaching London at 7AM on Monday.

In time to get back to class.