asking about differential diagnoses is the doctor-ese way of saying "ok if it's not what you think, what else are we considering as possible explanations?" which opens a conversation about whether it's appropriate to also test for those alternatives. Differentials should include the unlikely stuff as well as the likely stuff, and using the professional terminology can signal that you're capable of understanding that it's probably a likely thing but could be an unlikely one.

and if you end up in that same conversation about "no signs of infection", definitely inquire what signs would be externally perceptible. had he been able to actually examine the affected tissue and culture for bacteria, or was he just guessing?

the idea of research meetups makes me think about how much initial research i've been delegating to claude lately. It'd be interesting to see the research methodologies of those who have the most effective workflows.

Blindfolded taste tests - Food, beer, etc

this is adjacent to a preference profiling exercise that can be fun in a larger group -- have everyone rank their preferences regarding some reference stimuli, matchmake pairs or groups based on preference similarity (or dissimilarity!), discuss favorite things and perhaps learn new things to try because if someone with similar preferences enjoys a given thing (or someone with dissimilar preferences loathes it) then it's likely to suit you

Mary's room was clearly written by a man; adult human women are overwhelmingly likely to see red substances about a dozen times a year. If she was written as a colorblind person who had their colorblindness cured, the thought experiment would be more plausible. It is interesting in the context of discussing subjective experience how the classic thought experiment shows a lack of understanding of the kind of subjective experience its participant would have.

Anyways. I think for the way you're calling subjective experience physical, language is also physical. Both acoustic and visual forms of language are constrained by our physical capacities, abilities whose initial development appears to pre-date the formalization of language itself. Words sound like they do based in part on the genetic accidents of our capacities to speak and hear. If our hearing worked better for different pitches, or the physical apparatus of speech could produce different sets of easily differentiable phonemes, we would use very different words.

And yet the physical artifact of language somehow manages to nevertheless be emitted by non-embodied systems. Interesting!

For amusement, I threw the contents of your google doc at Opus and asked it for questions from the perspective of complimentary medicine. Below I have cherry-picked the ones I found interesting:

• Any experience with lymphatic drainage massage, especially around the neck and ears?
• Experience with acupuncture or acupressure for ear/sinus issues?
• Have you tried nasya (nasal oil application) with sesame or specific medicated oils?
• Any yoga practices, particularly inversions or specific pranayama (breathing exercises)?
• Use of neti pot with specific salt ratios or herbal additions?
• Differences when traveling to different climates or altitudes?
• During the periods where symptoms abated, what else was different (diet, stress, location)?
• Have hot showers, steam, or saunas provided any temporary relief?
• Any positions (lying down, head tilted) that change symptoms?
• Have you noticed any neck or jaw tension that preceded or accompanies the ear issues?
• Any history of teeth grinding or TMJ problems?
• Do you hold stress in your shoulders or upper body?
• Any changes in your breathing patterns since this started?
• How much time do you spend in air-conditioned or heated environments?
• Do you notice symptoms changing with humidity levels, not just pressure?
• Do you notice the symptoms worsen with certain foods (dairy, cold foods, raw foods)?
• What's your sleep pattern like? Do symptoms change with sleep quality?

I do not have great personal interest in the answers to these, but reflecting on them might highlight relevant patterns to add to your collection of documentation on the condition.

but I [ perhaps arrogantly ] pride myself that I'm better at this than even Claude, for the moment.

Try it anyways. A quick grep in the links you provided suggests there may be some tricks like specifically requesting the differential diagnoses that you may not yet be using (or you're using them and not mentioning it, can't tell from here). From my perspective, the "Haven't even come close to getting anyone to take me that seriously" earlier in your post suggests that more dakka in the social engineering for being taken seriously department may still be appropriate.

Ha, I've been trying to get my head scanned for four years

Getting a referral may be harder than pursuing the options for it which are available without a referral. It's doable, albeit expensive and annoying, without a doctor's recommendation for it.

If the certrizine has an effect, it's smaller than the effect of the antibiotics, garlic, and steroids.

If certrizine is the only antihistamine you've tried, it may be worth cycling through all available OTC alternatives to it while carefully tracking symptoms before ruling out the whole class.

Me: What do I have to wear to this thing?

Jessica: You can wear anything you want.

I wonder what sources of information on clothing he believes that she is privy to and he is not. 

He's asking her for rules about clothing in a way that sounds like he's asking her to choose a specific outfit. 

She's replying as if he asked whether a specific outfit was necessary, and as if she assumes he already knows the rules governing how to select an outfit for the occasion. 

I wonder why such a smart guy has had the same unproductive conversation 100 times instead of seeking alternative ways to communicate the underlying question more clearly, such as "would <clothes I usually wear> be acceptable for this?"

Whose job is it to build the actual tests that students encounter in the real world, and what are their incentives?

One warning is that LLMs generally suck at prompt writing.

I notice that I am surprised by how mildly you phrase this. Many of my "how can something this smart be this incredibly stupid?" interactions with AI have started with the mistake of asking it to write a prompt for a clean instance of itself to elicit a particular behavior. "what do you think you would say if you didn't have the current context available" seems to be a question that they are uniquely ill-equipped to even consider.

"IMPORTANT: Skip sycophantic flattery; avoid hollow praise and empty validation. Probe my assumptions, surface bias, present counter‑evidence, challenge emotional framing, and disagree openly when warranted; agreement must be earned through reason."

I notice that you're structuring this as some "don't" and then a lot of "do". Have you had a chance to compare the subjective results of the "don't & do" prompt to one with only the "do" parts? I'm curious what if any value the negatively framed parts are adding.

How can we rule out the possibility that anthropomorphization is an artifact of language use -- it's possible that any sufficiently advanced user of a human language may be forced by their use of that language to assume selfhood imply the presence of a humanoid "self" in order to communicate complex concepts effectively.

"AI cognition" and "AI use of language" are not quite the same thing. Have you been able to use non-linguistic AI as a reference point in sorting out what's "because transformer model" from what's "because language user"? Most of the consumer-facing image stuff is still heavily language-dependent, but perhaps there are frontier models in other fields trained in data other than language? I'm not sure what the state of the art is in those but it seems like a model trained on something like chemistry or weather forecasting could be worth considering in the question of what "pure AI", outside the social baggage imposed by language use, might be like.