derelict5432

Karma: 178

derelict5432 18 Jun 2026 14:46 UTC
8 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
32 points
12
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
33 points
9
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.

derelict5432 11 Apr 2026 17:09 UTC
4 points
2
on: Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found
Where is this quotation from? I don’t see a link.
Also: “isolated the relevant code”. That phrase could be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, right? It’s one thing to sift through a million lines of code and identify a bug. It’s another to be handed three lines that contain a bug and find it. Needle in a haystack vs. needle with two pieces of straw. If the methodology was identical, okay. But I’d like to see a side-by-side comparison of methodology here.

derelict5432 27 Mar 2026 0:25 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: What if superintelligence is just weak?
Is it your position that it is not obvious that a new species can causally drive another species extinct without being orders of magnitude more intelligent? Because the earth has had millions of existence proofs of that in the history of life.

derelict5432 24 Mar 2026 21:41 UTC
6 points
1
on: Monday AI Radar #18
I found the Dwarkesh—Terrence Tao conversation very frustrating, in particular the section on advancements in science, re heliocentrism and evolution. These guys talked about it epistemically as if everyone is a scientist. And in response to Dwarkesh’s question about why Darwin’s ideas took 200 years longer than Newton’s, even though they were simpler, Tao basically boiled it down to science communication. What?
The biggest causal impediment to the acceptance of both theories was religion and religious thought. It’s not even close. Darwin delayed publication for years because he was terrified of the societal and cultural blowback. Evolution dissolves the need for an interventionist creator and lumps us in with the rest of nature. It frames our ancestors as simple creatures akin to worms and bacteria. All the eloquence in the world isn’t going to overcome the entrenchment of the prevailing religious worldview. Ridiculous.

derelict5432 19 Mar 2026 17:40 UTC
5 points
2
on: Contra Anil Seth on AI Consciousness
I agree all these reasons are weak. What I’ve seen a lot less of are good reasons in favor of potential AI consciousness. Maybe that would just be a recap of functionalist arguments, idk.
Incidentally, I have particular disdain for the ‘simulation is not instantiation’ argument. My favorite counterexample is: sure, a simulation of a hurricane does not get you wet, but does a simulation of a calculator add and multiply numbers? Or does a simulation/emulation of an Atari game system let you play Adventure? In other words, simulations of computation are instantiations of computation.

derelict5432 18 Mar 2026 2:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn
Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand what your analogy is supposed to map to. What is Grog in the context of our conversation? You seem to admit at the end that LLMs are not really at all like Grog, in that Grog has no underlying bedrock of understanding, while modern LLMs do.
Thus, there’s more to knowledge than lists of facts. It’s ways that the facts all connect to each other in an interconnected web, and it’s ways to think about things, etc.
I’ll agree with this definition. If you’ll agree that knowledge can exist in written form and textbooks often embody exactly what you describe. They are very rarely ‘lists of facts’. More often than not, they are logically curated, organized explanations of phenomenon and events, along with rich descriptions of their connections and interactions. You seem to be preferentially upselling knowledge that is stored in synaptic weights while drastically downplaying knowledge recorded in other mediums. Why?

derelict5432 17 Mar 2026 3:12 UTC
2 points
−3
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: You can’t imitation-learn how to continual-learn
So according to you, a system that could acquire new facts, record them, access them, and use them, continuously in this way would not constitute ‘real’ continuous learning. It could conceivably fill its database with the actionable knowledge of 1000 yet unwritten textbooks, but that wouldn’t be ‘real’ to you.
1. “wholly new ways of conceptualizing and navigating the world, not just keeping track of what’s going on” are learnable and storable in the way I describe.
2. How is this type of learning not open-ended? What is limiting it?
3. Your third criteria seems to be related to unsupervised learning, specifically self-play. Not sure why you’d limit continual learning in this way, either.
You seem to be putting somewhat arbitrary constraints on what constitutes continual learning. Generally, if the system’s knowledge base is fixed, it’s incapable of continuing to learn. If it has the capacity to acquire new knowledge and skills, by whatever means, it continues to learn. You’re narrowing that general idea without really justifying why.