DARPA is the US Government's skunk works - the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They get to build a lot of the fancy toys we hear about. They also deal with a lot of other diciplines. From this Request for Information:
Request for Information (RFI) DARPA-SN-17-57 Confidence Levels for the Social and Behavioral Sciences
"Confidence Levels" for the Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is requesting information on new ideas and approaches for creating (semi)automated capabilities to assign "Confidence Levels" to specific studies, claims, hypotheses, conclusions, models, and/or theories found in social and behavioral science research. These social and behavioral science Confidence Levels should rapidly enable a non-expert to understand and quantify the confidence they can have in a specific research result or claim's reliability, reproducibility, and robustness.
In lay terms, they are seeing if anyone out there has a reliable and automated bullshit detector for the social and behavioral "sciences". I love it!
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