derelict5432

• derelict5432 14 Aug 2026 23:02 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: simulus’s comment on: Do It Like Darwin

  Yeah, he was literally a geologist. Retract that.

  I thought of Einstein, but that’s a case of coming up with thought experiments, not mapping from existing observational or experimental data from another field (unless I’m not understanding Einstein’s methodology).

• derelict5432 14 Aug 2026 19:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: simulus’s comment on: Do It Like Darwin

  Thanks for reading and responding.

  As I noted, he was heavily influenced by Lyell, and as far as I know, he didn’t spend time gathering geological evidence.

  My core thesis is that observational data plus existing interventional data from other domains is sufficient to generate pioneering scientific work, and Darwin demonstrates that. He had solidified the theory by 1838, and that did not require him to gather anything himself. All the pieces were lying around extant. Someone needed to map them, and he did that. But no one needed to perform any additional observations or experiments. You may argue he personally needed to do so in order for the theory to gel in his brain, but the fact stands that it was not strictly necessary for anyone to make new observations or carry out new experiments to make those mappings and synthesize the theory. That was not a dependency in the same way a completely untested hypothesis requires fresh evidence.

Do It Like Darwin

• derelict5432 11 Aug 2026 22:53 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Gavin Runeblade’s comment on: Claude Opus 5 Just Beat My Text-Based Ad­ven­ture Game Benchmark

  I hadn’t seen the Zork benchmark, thank you!

  No problem.

  Yeah I would be super interested in experiments with MUDs and other open-ended domains. Evaluation is the hard part. Something like farming would be easy to measure. Determining player reaction would be highly subjective. There’s definitely a lot of interest now in harder-to-verify and open-ended tasks, so you should definitely find the time. ;)

• derelict5432 11 Aug 2026 21:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Gavin Runeblade’s comment on: Claude Opus 5 Just Beat My Text-Based Ad­ven­ture Game Benchmark

  No problem.

  Actually, there are already benchmarks for some of these. There’s a Zork benchmark, for example: https://​​github.com/​​mnky9800n/​​zork-bench. The latest activity is around April of this year, as far as I can tell. And interestingly, the results on that benchmark were pretty bad up to that point.

  As you suggest, I was worried about contamination. The Zork benchmark indicates that wasn’t that big a worry, because there are plenty of full walkthroughs on the internet and the agents still perform badly. A couple of hypotheses around this are that such data is sparse in training, or that converting third-person description into first-person agentic action is very difficult.

  So I wanted a domain I was sure was not in the training data. And I wanted a small, constrained test that I had full control over. Plus, it was fun to design.

Claude Opus 5 Just Beat My Text-Based Ad­ven­ture Game Benchmark

• derelict5432 18 Jun 2026 14:46 UTC

  9 points

  0

  on: GLM 5.2 play­ing text adventures

  I too have been experimenting with text adventure games as a benchmark:
  
  https://​​derekjames.substack.com/​​p/​​youre-standing-in-a-clearing-in-a

  https://​​derekjames.substack.com/​​p/​​text-adventure-benchmarks-revisited

  I also have found, like everyone else it seems, that these systems are very bad at these domains, even with extensive, tailored scaffolding/​harnesses. For my work, I created a small custom domain. I tried to dig through your previous posts, but couldn’t seem to work out your methodology very well. I’ve seen several people using Zork. Are you breaking Zork down into smaller sub-games? Or are these custom games you implemented?

• derelict5432 2 Jun 2026 11:08 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: C-Zom­bie Uploads Down­load­ing Them­selves & Believ­ing You’re A C-Zombie

  I was responding directly to this:

  Some people were arguing that uploaded minds (or any digital minds) wouldn’t be conscious, but rather philosophical zombies—that is a mind that acts exactly as if it was conscious without actually being conscious.

  How are these people who think this assessing whether or not the digital minds are conscious or not? That was my point. If they have a very strong argument (which wasn’t presented) or evidence that digital minds are not conscious, out of that comes the delta, right? If there is no delta, we have as much reason and evidence for the digital mind being conscious as we do for the biological one.

• derelict5432 1 Jun 2026 18:24 UTC

  5 points

  −3

  on: C-Zom­bie Uploads Down­load­ing Them­selves & Believ­ing You’re A C-Zombie

  The concept of a p-zombie is incoherent as framed. In the case you’re talking about, if the digitally-uploaded mind (and body too? into a virtual environment?) is not conscious, great, now we’ve got a great idea what plays a causal role in consciousness and it’s apparently missing in the digital version and present in the real-world one. That should help us isolate it. Otherwise, this is just ungrounded biological chauvinism.

• derelict5432 13 May 2026 11:37 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Epistemic Im­mun­ode­pres­sion in the Age of AI

  I’d be curious to know which tools you’re using and what your workflow is.

  Generic commercial chat portals from frontier labs are not (primarily) optimized for epistemology. They’re optimized for likeability, perceived usefulness, engagement, etc. They are not inherently truth-seeking. They do not stake out and commit to factual positions. You can nudge them in a particular direction and push them pretty reliably into whatever space confirms your biases.

  Literature reviews are useful, if you demand links to sources and double-check them. Grammar/​spelling checks are great. But using a public chatbot and expecting a rigorous lab partner is not a good idea.

  The big labs have all recently announced/​released science tools:

  • OpenAI — GPT-Rosalind (announced April 16–17, 2026, named after Rosalind Franklin)

  • Anthropic — Claude for Life Sciences (launched last October as a suite of connectors and skills)

  • Google DeepMind — AI Co-Clinician (announced April 30, 2026)

  None of these are open. GPT-Rosalind is gated trusted-access; Co-Clinician is a research project, not deployable; Claude for Life Sciences is enterprise-targeted via API credits.

  LLMs don’t necessarily lead to what you’re calling “epistemic immunodepression”. They can and will if used naively. The same way AI coding tools can easily lead to mountains of technical-debt slop without some basic rigor. The tools need to be optimized for that particular role and they need to be used responsibly. Right now, neither is happening at scale.

• derelict5432 11 May 2026 17:48 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Who Got Breasts First and How We Got Them

  I did some googling and apparently captive male chimpanzees show little interest in human female breasts. This makes some sense because they’re chimpanzees.

  I lol’d here, but maybe there’s a serious point?

  You mention upright stance as part of the nursing or thermo hypothesis. Why wouldn’t the uniqueness to humans be largely a part of the upright stance? They don’t feature nearly as prominently in a tree-dense environment or if you’re hunched down on all fours most of the time, right? For a sexually-selected trait, they need to be displayed. Sexual selection also seems to correspond strongly with the onset of fertility.

• derelict5432 10 May 2026 23:53 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: roha’s comment on: The Dar­wi­nian Honey­moon—Why I am not as im­pressed by hu­man progress as I used to be

  Fair enough. I’ll retract and revise to macro-organisms.

• derelict5432 10 May 2026 17:50 UTC

  35 points

  16

  on: The Dar­wi­nian Honey­moon—Why I am not as im­pressed by hu­man progress as I used to be

  The world optimized itself.

  I think you have a good point buried in this post, but this doesn’t seem like it. The world didn’t optimize itself. Humans optimized for chicken volume, taste, and other parameters, and generally ignored the suffering and well-being of the chickens. It wasn’t ‘the world’ and it didn’t just optimize. It optimized certain variables at the expense of others.

  Also, I’d push back on the idea (popularized probably most effectively by Pinker) that we’re doing ‘so much better’ now than we were 200 years ago. Again, for certain parameters, yes. For many others, no. The biggest factor in these discussions that you’re sort of pointing to is risk. We have increased per capita GDP, health outcomes, etc. But we have also massively increased X risk. We now have multiple non-negligible vectors for causing widespread catastrophe and possible extinction, not just among humans, but against all life on the planet. That in itself complicates the picture of how well we’re doing.

  Which sort of dovetails with your point, which is that many times things are going great, until they aren’t. But you don’t specifically frame it as an increase in risk. You seem to be attributing it to a sort of semi-random unpredictable switch from doing well to doing poorly, as a sort of inevitable cost of optimization. I don’t think that’s right.

• derelict5432 6 May 2026 11:55 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing, con­fir­ma­tion bias, and AI risk theory

  I also don’t have a strong sense of how pervasive underconfidence is, and my predictions would be relatively weak. But there are of course dynamics like Imposter Syndrome that are relatively common. One of my closest friends will rarely take a firm stand on any claim. He seems to do this in the name of fairness and epistemic humility, but it seems like a drastic overcorrection.

  On the second point, sure. A lot of the people who need to correct for overconfidence are precisely the one that wield disproportionate influence and power (which their overconfidence almost certainly helped them attain). They’re also probably the ones least likely to calibrate, because incentives.

  And there’s an interesting dynamic, especially in public discussions, where the tone is probably more properly adjusted for the viewers/​readers than it is for the person you’re actually engaged with. I agree that changing an individual’s mind is very, very difficult. What I’m talking about is the danger of conflating being nice to the person and being nice to the ideas in a way that projects fairness and respect of the ideas that are completely unwarranted.

  A perfectly civil and respectful public debate with a person who believes that non-white races are subhuman, or a climate change denialist, or full-on anti-vaxxer likely does more harm than good, if the ideas are given full respect and consideration. For a private discussion, I’d agree that the strategy should shift significantly, if the goal is to convince that person. In the first case, those beliefs need to be confronted with aggression, not politeness. They aren’t just epistemically terrible, they’re actively dangerous. Treating them with the veneer of legitimacy is likely to confuse bystanders who will come away with the wrong impression.

• derelict5432 6 May 2026 1:27 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing, con­fir­ma­tion bias, and AI risk theory

  A few thoughts:

  1. The post seems dangerously close to advocating a general lowering of confidence across the board. I don’t think that’s what you’re advocating, but it kind of sounds that way. Most people are wrongly overconfident, but the prescription for that is not for everyone to dial it down. Instead, we all need to be better calibrated. Some people need to actually up their belief confidence levels.

  2. Overconfident belief is very often highly adaptive. That’s probably why it is so prevalent. Again, that makes a coarse-grain corrective potentially problematic if there’s a conflict between utility and truth-seeking.

  3. I like most of your prescriptions for avoiding confirmation bias, but ‘be nice’ is a tough one. Bad beliefs are bad. Very bad beliefs are responsible for a huge amount of suffering, injustice, death, etc. They need to be choked out in the shallow end of the pool. There is a moral and rational obligation to not be nice to bad beliefs. Now, it’s difficult to tease apart being nice to beliefs and being nice to people. A lot of the time people take their beliefs very personally. So this is difficult territory to navigate. But you don’t want to be so careful and considerate that you give aid and comfort to beliefs that underpin the very worst outcomes. So ‘be nice’ as a sort of blanket prescription seems a little too generic, though I agree it should be the default when dealing with the person.

• derelict5432 4 May 2026 19:11 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: kbear’s comment on: Tak­ing woo se­ri­ously but not literally

  Not sure I understand your question. Are you basically asking what a placebo is?

• derelict5432 4 May 2026 15:29 UTC

  14 points

  7

  on: Tak­ing woo se­ri­ously but not literally

  Something like the placebo effect may certainly be a big part of why some woo things work.

  This is almost certainly the case, and you give it a bit of short shrift. You wonder out loud why you would get a particular placebo effect with a particular practice. There are lots of potential reasons. Those need to be studied and the evidence needs to be documented.

  That’s the basic problem with woo. What really makes it woo is that the causal mechanisms for its efficacy are highly suspect and cannot be identified through rigorous intervention/​experimentation.

  Prayer has a lot of well-demonstrated physical and mental positive outcomes. What do you think of prayer? Why do you think it works?

• derelict5432 2 May 2026 11:23 UTC

  34 points

  10

  on: Pri­mary Care Physi­ci­ans are In­com­pe­tent. We Need More of Them.

  Sorry, I stopped reading because of the disingenuous shifting very early on.

  They should be able to reliably diagnose diseases they are trained to diagnose.

  Okay, agree. What’s their reliability for all diseases they are trained to diagnose?

  Failure to diagnose uncommon diseases is rampant

  Oh, okay, we’re going to focus on their reliability to diagnose uncommon diseases. So how do they do with that?

  A survey of patients with rare diseases found that, in about half of cases, patients received at least one incorrect diagnosis, and two thirds required visits to at least three different doctors before being diagnosed.

  Okay, we somehow went from general reliability, to uncommon, to rare without skipping a beat. You’re talking about different things. This lack of basic consistency undermined your credibility immediately.

• derelict5432 1 May 2026 12:05 UTC

  10 points

  0

  on: 11 ways to be less deferential

  Refuse to ‘understand’ things unless they are very clear. I don’t really know how to do this, because I don’t know what the alternative is like—being steadfastly confused about things seems to come naturally to me and I don’t know how else to be, but maybe you have both affordances available here and could lean one way or the other.

  I’m interpreting this to mean: don’t be dazzled by bullshit. Don’t just nod along to authoritative-sounding, jargon-filled rhetoric simply because it has the veneer of deepness. Understand here is in quotes. I think it just means in this case to go along.
  
  In grad school, there were many colloquia where a visiting professor would give a presentation. Everyone would nod along. A few polite questions would be asked, and then after some light applause we’d partake of butter cookies and punch. Meanwhile, I would often be sitting there wondering what the hell just happened. What were they really saying? If they were saying X, wasn’t that just complete nonsense? But it would take me a while to think through it and parse it to find out the content really was vacuous.
  
  Over the years I’ve found a good technique is to try to translate complex-sounding claims into their simplest form. Sometimes this is difficult. Some complex things are necessarily complex. In academia, though, complexity is very often a smokescreen, and the simplicity translation often exposes this.

• derelict5432 16 Apr 2026 13:56 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Post-Scarcity is bullshit

  Agree. The term ‘post-scarcity’ focuses purely on instrumental goals: abundant energy, longevity, etc. Transhumanism tends to focus on the same kinds of things: immortality, invulnerability, power. These are instrumental. What are you going to do with all that power and longevity? They’re often putting the cart before the horse. Make great art? Pursue truth? Mitigate suffering? Enhance personal rights? The are the ends. Power is the means, but very often it’s treated as an end in itself.