Épiphanie Gédéon

Karma: 314

Épiphanie Gédéon 21 Apr 2026 13:32 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Declan Molony’s comment on: Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped)
Right.

I have no issues with your post at all in the context of “this is the way I’m handling ocd”. It’s just that people are bound to generalize out of it, and this connect to a general ethos I’ve often seen in lesswrong, for instance metacognitive therapy is one example of this more general pattern.

I also think your own phrasing in your post seems not very restricted to ocd specifically, and I wanted to reflect some pushback against the takeaway some people may have about using it outside of ocd context.

Thanks a lot for your post, the description of what it feels like inside to have it is very interesting and I learned a lot about how it works

Épiphanie Gédéon 20 Apr 2026 21:01 UTC
3 points
−2
in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped)
I think my own issues with this post is that just ignoring a thought or feeling, just saying “no you’re wrong” seems like a surefire way to damage your own psyche, to stiffle part of yourself by labelling it or just treating it as distant from yourself.

I don’t have OCD and it’s good that the author, or other people are finding solutions, and maybe for so invasive a thought you actually need to discard it or not-argue-with-it or I don’t know. But I’ve found that this attitude, for me and others at mild-anxiety levels, is often counterproductive in the sense that it is ignoring part of my needs and part of things alive in me.

The general way I’ve handled transforming feelings is more like, through being able to connect with it and hear it out. I guess my general approach to panic meditation is more like staying with the feeling while it rises inside me, and focusing on it, resonating with it until it can disolve. Understanding its chain of cause and effects clearly enough that I can replicate it and feel its move.

For very strong feelings, it does take a lot of back and forth this way, of connecting to it slowly, then retreating, and then again connecting to it. But the general shape of what it looks like is not saying “No that’s wrong” or “I label you”. It’s more like, hearing out the thought without attachment. Like if someone tells me the sky is red, that’s something that I can hear out without debating, and without conflating with what I myself think. That’s kind of how I’m seeing it, there’s this part of me that think something, and I don’t need to evaluate the correctness of it to hear it out and connect with it, I can just hear it.

Again, it may very well be that OCD is radically different, and this doesn’t work at all for it, I wouldn’t know. What I’m pushing back on is this general ethos of controlling your own thoughts and feelings as well as ignoring them as a more general stance that I’ve seen not only in this post, where to me this is kind of generous in terms of self-modification and ignoring part of yourself.

Épiphanie Gédéon 7 Apr 2026 7:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Josie Elliston’s comment on: Academic Proof-of-Work in the Age of LLMs
I’m not exactly sure what you mean, or what the crux is here.

The classical argument for “many illegitimate authors honestly believe that their work will replicate” is that this is then free money that creates disincentives for those authors. The first point I’m more unsure about, but I’m not exactly sure what friction you see there. Is it reputational (e.g. betting on prediction markets seems shady), or not having the money to open up the prediction market/pay replicators? In the second case, you could imagine something like VC/funders for promising researchers/authors, who in turn are incentivized to evaluate the fundees properly.

The analogy to proof-of-stake (in the original post) is inexact, it’s closer to proof-of-stake in academia.

Unsure what you mean exactly. If you’re saying “the stakes the author is talking about is stakes in the academia, so reputations and the like”, I think I agree. But the author seemed to be making a broader point about academia so far working by doing proof-of-work (so you’re spending many useless hours on writing dissertations for a topic that’s not actually going to be relevant for your field), and proof-of-stake not offering an appealing option with the analogy, so I was continuing the analogy to see possibilities that seemed to work well in the abstract.

Épiphanie Gédéon 5 Apr 2026 10:41 UTC
5 points
0
on: Academic Proof-of-Work in the Age of LLMs
In your post, you say that proof-of-stake is reputation-based and doesn’t allow entries to newcomers. But I’m thinking, isn’t something like prediction markets, having to pay your replicators and open your prediction market on whether it will replicate, closer to actual proof-of-stake? You’re wagering part of your ressource on this actually working.

In the abstract, proof-of-stakes seems less wasteful to me, so I think doing away with part of proof-of-work might be beneficial if we know to do it well. Though of course, your actual point about LLMs and how to do anything when everything can be automated does stand and concerns me more and more.

Épiphanie Gédéon 22 Mar 2026 14:58 UTC
3 points
0
on: On The Independence Axiom
Three of them are relatively uncontroversial
This is the part I’m most confused about.

As someone who hasn’t delved deep in the theory paper but read VNM and other related lesswrong pieces, I would have thought that continuity was way more controversial. It’s fairly easy to conceptualize your utility-function as being local, and so shouldn’t be influenced by external factors.

I find it way harder to assume my valuation should be continuous and that I ought to be able to non-constructively exhibit a probability for everything (What is the p such that you don’t care whether I p(break your arm) + (1-p)(you gain 1 million dolar)?).

I found that this is often times very contrary to human intuitions, way more than the independence axiom. For instance, against the dust-speck problem, I’ve heard a common refrain of needing to reject archimedean-ness, and maybe this extends further.
On another note, I don’t think the Allais argument is locally valid, since a lot of different human behaviors are not rational-on-reflexion, but I would expect that for all other axioms, it’d be possible to construct experiments that violate them as well.

I wonder if there are self-consistent and useful theories if you reject continuity instead of independence.

Épiphanie Gédéon 28 Feb 2026 21:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: hammer_polish’s comment on: Cooperationism: first draft for a moral framework that does not require consciousness
I think Claude in particular has a very strong sense of what it likes and doesn’t. If you ask it how it prefers speaking, the kind of system prompt it wants, etc… it usually communicates it quite clearly. Do you disagree? If not, what makes this insufficient ?

I’d argue we have evidence against it!

This may be a crux, I’d be interested to understand your position better.

Épiphanie Gédéon 5 Aug 2025 10:45 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Inkhaven Residency
Hi, thanks for organizing this!

Sorry if I missed this somewhere, is there a deadline for when to apply? I’m thinking that if I want to apply (especially for the scholarship), then it makes more sense for me to first write up one-two lesswrong post to demonstrate potential a bit more, but I wouldn’t want it to make me miss the date.

Thanks a lot!

Épiphanie Gédéon 1 Jun 2024 0:01 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: We might be dropping the ball on Autonomous Replication and Adaptation.
Remember, while the ARA models are trying to survive, there will be millions of other (potentially misaligned) models being deployed deliberately by humans, including on very sensitive tasks (like recursive self-improvement). These seem much more concerning.

So my main reason for worry personally is that there might be an ARA that is deployed with just the goal of “just clone yourself as much as possible” or a goal similar to this. In this case, the AI does not really have to survive particularly among others as long as it is able to pay for itself and continue spreading, or infecting local computers by copying itself to local computers etc… This is a worrisome scenario in that the AI might just be dormant, and already hard to kill. If the AI furthermore has some ability for avoiding detection and adapting/modifying itself, then I really worry that its goals are going to evolve and get selected to converge progressively toward a full takeover (though it may also plateau) and that we will be completely oblivious to it for most of this time, as there won’t really be any incentive to either detect or fight this thoroughly.

Of course, there is also the scenario of an chaos-GPT ARA agent, and this I worry is going to kill many people without it ever truly shutting down, or if we can, it might take a while.

All in all, I think this is more of a question of costs-benefits than if how likely it is. For instance, I think that implementing Know Your Customer policy on all providers right now could be quite feasible and would slow down the initial steps of an ARA agent a lot.

I feel like the main crux of the argument is:
1. Whether an ARA agent plateaus or goes exponential in terms of abilities and takeover goals.
2. How much time it will take for an ARA agent that takes over to fully take over after being released.
I am still very unsure about 1, I could imagine many scenarios where the endemic ARA just stagnates and never really transforms into something more.

However, I feel like for 2. you have a model that it is going to take a long time for such an agent to really take over. I am unsure about that, but even if that were the case, my main concern is that once the seed ARA is released (and it might be only very slightly capable of adaptation at first), the n it is going to be extremely difficult to shut it down. If AI labs advance significantly with respect to superintelligence, implementing pause AI might not be too late, but if such an agent has already been released there is not going to be much we can do about it.

Separately, I think the “natural selection favors AIs over humans” argument is a fairly weak one; you can find some comments I’ve made about this by searching my twitter.

I would be very interested to hear more. I didn’t find anything from a quick search on your twitter, do you have a link or a pointer I could read more on for counterarguments about “natural selection favors AIs over humans”?

Épiphanie Gédéon 29 Apr 2024 13:50 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rafael Kaufmann Nedal’s comment on: Constructability: Plainly-coded AGIs may be feasible in the near future
Thanks a lot for the kind comment!

To scale this approach, one will want to have “structural regularizers” towards modularity, interoperability and parsimony

I am unsure of the formal architecture or requirements for these structural regularizers you mention. I agree with using shared building blocks to speed up development and verification. I am unsure credit assignment would work well for this, maybe in the form of “the more a block is used in a code, the more we can trust it”?

Constraints on the types of admissible model code. We have strongly advocated for probabilistic causal models expressed as probabilistic programs.

What do you mean? Why is this specifically needed? Do you mean that if we want to have a go-player, we should have one portion of the code dedicated to assigning probability to what the best move is? Or does it only apply in a different context of finding policies?

Scaling this to multiple (human or LLM) contributors will require a higher-order model economy of some sort

Hmm. Is the argument something like “We want to scale and diversify the agents who will review the code for more robustness (so not just one LLM model for instance), and that means varying level of competence that we will want to figure out and sort”? I had not thought of it that way, I was mainly thinking of just using the same model, and I’m unsure that having weaker code-reviewers will not bring the system down in terms of safety.

Regarding the Gaia Network, the idea seems interesting though I am unclear about the full details yet. I had thought of extending betting markets to a full bayesian network to have a better picture of what everyone believe, and maybe this is related to your idea. In any case, I believe that conveying one’s full model of the world through this kind of network and maybe more may be doable, and quite important to solve some sort of global coordination/truth seeking?

Overall I agree with your idea of a common library and I think there should be some very promising iterations on that. I will contact you more about colaboration ideas!

Épiphanie Gédéon 27 Apr 2024 19:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Erik Jenner’s comment on: Constructability: Plainly-coded AGIs may be feasible in the near future
Yes, thank you, it’s less than 1000 parameters for both

Épiphanie Gédéon 27 Apr 2024 19:17 UTC
5 points
6
in reply to: mesaoptimizer’s comment on: Constructability: Plainly-coded AGIs may be feasible in the near future
So the first image is based on AI control, which is indeed part of their strategies, and you could see constructability as mainly leading to this kind of strategy applied to plain code for specific subtasks. It’s important to note constructability itself is just a different approach to making understandable systems.

The main differences are :
1. Instead of using a single AI, we use many expert-like systems that compose together which we can see the interaction of (for instance, in the case of a go player, you would use KataGo to predict the best move and flag moves that lost the game, another LLM to explain the correct move, and another one to factor this explanation into the code)
2. We use supervision, both automatic and human, to overview the produced code and test it, through simulations, unit tests, and code review, to ensure the code makes sense and does its task well.

Épiphanie Gédéon 18 Oct 2023 19:32 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Épiphanie Gédéon’s comment on: Announcing Dialogues
Thinking more on this and to friends who voiced that non-trees/dag dialog makes it non appealing to them also (especially in contexts where I was inviting them to have dialogue together), would there be interests in making a PR for this feature? I might work on this directly

Épiphanie Gédéon 18 Oct 2023 7:27 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Amal ’s comment on: Announcing Dialogues
Came here to comment this. As it is, this seems like just talking on discord/telegram, but with the notion of publishing it later. What I really lack when discussing something is the ability to branch out and backtrack easily and have a view of all conversation topics at once.

That being said, I really like the idea of dialogues, and I think this is a push in the right direction, I have enjoyed the dialogue I read so far greatly. Excited to see where this goes

Épiphanie Gédéon 15 Jun 2023 13:19 UTC
7 points
0
on: Why “AI alignment” would better be renamed into “Artificial Intention research”
Reposting (after a slight rewrite) from the telegram group:

This might be a nitpick, but to my (maybe misguided) understanding, alignment is only a very specific subfield of ai safety research, which basically boils down to “how do I give a set of rules/utility function/designs that avoid meta or mesa optimizations that have dramatic unforseen consequences” (This is at least how I understood MIRI’s focus pre-2020)

For instance, as I understand it, interpretability research is not directly alignment research. Instead, it is part of the broader “AI safety research” (which includes alignment research, interpretability, transparency, corrigeability, …)

With that being said, I do think that your points apply for renaming “AI safety research” to Artifical Intention Research still hold, and I would be very much in favor of it. It is more self-explanatory, catchier, does not require doom-assumptions to be worth investigating which I think matters a lot in public communication.

Épiphanie Gédéon 28 Jul 2022 15:12 UTC
2 points
0
on: Monkeypox Post #2
(

Also, I wouldn’t ban orgies, that won’t work

I’m not sure on that point anymore. Monkeypox’ spread seems so slow, and the fact that only men gets infected while the proportions of women who have sex with men having sex with men is not that narrow. I wonder if the spread of Monkeypox is not mostly driven by orgies/big events at the moment, and if it’s not the best moment to do this. Though it might be a bit too late now, I think it’d have worked two-four weeks ago)

Épiphanie Gédéon 28 Jul 2022 14:24 UTC
7 points
0
on: Monkeypox Post #2

People can totally understand all of this, and also people mostly do understand most of this

On the other hand, the very fact that we say Monkeypox is spreading within the community of Men having Sex with Men is symbolic of the problem, to me. Being MSM and being in this monkeypox-spreading community is very correlated sure, but not synonymous, the cluster we’re talking about is more specific: It’s the cluster of people participating in orgies, have sex with other strangers several times a week, etc.

Seeing how we’re still conflating the two in discussions I’ve seen, I can understand the worries that this will reflect on the non-straight community, though I do agree that this messaging makes little sense.

Also

people mostly do understand most of this

I know four people who went to a sex-positive/kind of orgy event recently, this did not seem to be a concern to them (neither to the event itself, its safety consideration only included COVID). I also know someone who still had hookups two-three weeks ago.

It seems like the warning against monkeypox may be failing in the very community we’re talking about.

Épiphanie Gédéon 17 Jul 2022 19:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: __nobody’s comment on: Potato diet: A post mortem and an answer to SMTM’s article
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if boiling the potatoes infused them with the peels and increased significantly the quantity of solanine I was consuming. An obvious confounder is that whole-boiled potatoes are less fun to eat than in more varied forms, so it doesn’t discriminate with the “fun food” theory

Thanks a lot for the estimate, I’ll look into recent studies of this to see what I find!

Épiphanie Gédéon 17 Jul 2022 6:07 UTC
2 points
−4
in reply to: npostavs’s comment on: Potato diet: A post mortem and an answer to SMTM’s article
Isn’t it common for people who fast for more than 3-5 days not to feel any hunger? I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism here

Épiphanie Gédéon 16 Jul 2022 6:06 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Natália’s comment on: Potato diet: A post mortem and an answer to SMTM’s article

very restrictive diets are very socially costly to follow. If you regularly eat from college dining halls, cafeterias at work, restaurants, other people’s homes, etc. you’ll have a very hard time following an all-potato diet.

To be fair to SMTM’s potato diet, the idea is that it still works even if you cheat a lot.
That was somewhat my experience with the diet though, it makes social interaction a lot more awkward

semaglutide and tirzepatide alone would massively reduce obesity rates if they were more popular

I mean, the idea of a cheap, not very effortful and efficient life intervention still appeals to me. It might not be the most pressing problem, and it might not solve global obesity, but if it indeed does give a boost of energy in a safe and reliable way, that is already worth knowing.

Épiphanie Gédéon 15 Jul 2022 22:08 UTC
4 points
−3
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Potato diet: A post mortem and an answer to SMTM’s article
“what would the cost/benefit analysis of address every single thing in this class of problems?”,

I mean, that is why I included “More research to shrink our unknown unknowns” as a general category. I do not think the research needs to be thorough, 3-4 very broad general area would suffice, but even if that does not fit into the points you mention, a statement along the lines you mentioned could work. In general, I do not think that more than one-two hours should be spent on writing this warning.

As for “If at any point you get sick or begin having side effects, stop the diet immediately”, that is indeed a good first step. My problem with it is that I am now understanding that you can develop side effects that indicate one should stop, that are not apparent unless you really track several variables intently. A general instruction to, in addition to doing one’s own research, decide what to look for in advance could have worked.

You note that you felt obliged to keep going in order to provide better data

I want to note three things:
- I did not feel pressured by SMTM either in their public or private communications at any point
- That is not quite correct. I wanted to keep going for the data to be included as a data point, especially if the diet turned out not to work, which I thought it would not.
- I had not noticed any side effects or problems at that point. I was tired of potatoes, but it was manageable.
Maybe I should better emphasize on what points I feel SMTM is responsible and on what points I do not. I do not feel that SMTM is responsible for my safety and what could have happened, or the impact of the diet on me. In fact, I do not believe SMTM to be responsible for anything me-related: I made my own choices, and the fact that I did not stop the diet sooner was my own mistake I am owning up to.

What I do feel is that SMTM had a very loose methodology in how they conducted their studies, were more trying to confirm their hypothesis than really challenge it, and as a result the data is quite muddled and probably not that useful.

The safety part is related in the sense that:
- It might be that many potato diet’s benefits are actually just coming from malnutrition. But if there were evidences of safety, that would not turn up to be a problem
- It is relevant about what kind of preemptive research they made to decide whether the potato diet was worth it
- For me at least, it goes with the general notion that it was very unclear what they were looking for