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ndriscoll | on: Start Doing Graph Theory
You can't just make up an identity, claim you have a PhD from a well-known university, and appear on someone else's (e.g. the university's) website. I asked ChatGPT:

> The author of https://vertex.degree/ claims to have a phd and taught courses. Can you find evidence from the named institutions?

And it gave me links to .edu sites corroborating the claims (e.g. he's on a registry of PhDs[0]). I asked if the institutions link to this site, and it said his personal site links to this site[1], and that CMU links to his personal site[2]. If anything it's far easier to check this stuff now. Took me 30 seconds.

[0] https://www.cmu.edu/math/grad/phd/past-recipients.html

[1] https://misha.fish/

[2] https://www.math.cmu.edu/users/math/mlavrov/

BHSPitMonkey | parent
Sure, posting under a well-known research institutions own domain is a strong link in the trust chain in this example.

Of course you have to be able to trust that some post you find (which names a real person doing work in the field) really comes from that person and is not simply stealing their authority.

My point wasn't that this specific case is like that, but rather that online spaces are bombarded with claims that take far less effort to generate than it takes to verify or debunk. And once some story is seen by enough eyeballs, no withdrawal or retraction is going to have the same reach (bad actors already know this).