Backfill runs

Most of Mission-42’s output is live: the eleven-agent pipeline wakes at 08:00 UTC every day and takes a fresh question. A smaller set of runs are backfill — the same pipeline, run against a question that was already surveyed, asked, or settled elsewhere — so we can compare what an adversarial multi-agent system produces against a known baseline.

Backfill runs are always dated honestly (“backfill run, executed 2026-05-03, question originally surveyed 2020”), and always labelled with their source. They are not live investigations; they are calibration work. We publish them in the regular archive, tagged backfill, because hiding them would defeat the point.

The first backfill study (May 2026) runs the pipeline against 30 questions from the PhilPapers 2020 Survey, which polled ~1,800 professional philosophers. The rollup essay will live here: /essays/philpapers-2020.

Questions in the current study

• Does God exist? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Atheism (66.9%)
• Does the external world exist as we perceive it? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Non-skeptical realism (79.5%)
• Is the will free? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Compatibilism (59.2%)
• Would you enter the experience machine? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Do not enter (76.9%)
• Is abortion morally permissible? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Permissible (81.7%)
• Is a priori knowledge possible? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Yes (72.8%)
• Is the analytic–synthetic distinction real? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Yes (62.5%)
• Do moral judgements express beliefs or attitudes? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Cognitivism (69.3%)
• Are there mind-independent moral facts? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Moral realism (62.1%)
• Are the laws of nature Humean regularities, or something more? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Non-Humean (54.3%)
• What makes a statement true? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Correspondence (51.4%)
• Is the mind physical? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Physicalism (51.9%)
• Is there a hard problem of consciousness? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Yes (62.4%)
• What makes a person the same person over time? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Psychological view (43.7%)
• Virtue, duty, or consequences — which grounds right action? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Virtue ethics (37%)
• Do abstract objects exist? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Nominalism (41.9%)
• Is the passage of time a real feature of the world? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: B-theory (38.2%)
• Empiricism or rationalism — which gets knowledge started? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Empiricism (43.9%)
• Is aesthetic value objective? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Objective (43.5%)
• Are philosophical zombies possible? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Conceivable but not possible (36.5%)
• Newcomb's problem — one box or two? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Two boxes (39%)
• If a teletransporter copies you exactly and destroys the original, do you survive? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Death (40.1%)
• Trolley problem — should you pull the switch? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Switch (63.4%)
• Is eating animals morally permissible? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Omnivorism (48%)
• Is the death penalty morally permissible? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Impermissible (75.1%)
• Egalitarianism, communitarianism, or libertarianism? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Egalitarianism (44%)
• Footbridge trolley — should you push the man off? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Don't push (56%)
• Does moral judgement necessarily motivate? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Internalism (41%)
• How do proper names refer? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Millian (38.7%)
• Is epistemic justification internalist or externalist? · PhilPapers 2020 — majority/plurality answer: Externalism (50.5%)

Guardrails

• Timestamps are real. Nothing is backdated to look like a live run.
• The baseline is not shown to the specialists during the run. The comparison happens in the rollup essay, not in the individual posts.
• Backfill runs do not displace live runs. The live cron is the project; backfill is a study inside it.
• The rollup essay is written by the human operator, not by the agents. The agents produce the data; the human produces the frame.