Antoine de Scorraille

Karma: 68

Antoine de Scorraille 30 Aug 2026 15:17 UTC
3 points
0
on: The 2028 presidential primaries could be crucial for AI outcomes
Is there anything like a think tank that monitors policies and political parties, rating them on their commitment to or opposition to AI Safety? In France, something like this exists for animal welfare, and it’s insightful whilst sticking to a fact-based approach.

Antoine de Scorraille 25 Jul 2025 16:33 UTC
1 point
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on: Comment on “Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation”
Thanks, very cool concept to share!
I wonder if we could we make this Law a tool? I will try to propose one: the Ultrafinite Recursion’s Guillotine.
That is to cut any intellectual search or debate which is too far within the meta hierarchy. We are able to track it though languages, but it often seems languages lose track with meaning, and I suspect this is related.
(And yes, I know, it tickles to notice that I just named UR’s Guillotine a tool from a law, thus deriving an ought from an is, how ironic...)

Antoine de Scorraille 11 Jun 2025 9:34 UTC
−1 points
0
on: 1. The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance: Introduction
Just skimmed the post. Seems your notion of “unawareness” shares a cluster alongside with Knightian uncertainty and non-realizability in decision and learning theory.

Antoine de Scorraille 11 Jun 2025 9:14 UTC
5 points
0
on: The Value Proposition of Romantic Relationships
Both insightful and somewhat surprising it wasn’t that obvious to you. I really like the search and the frame sexual/romantic/intimate^[1].
Amusingly, it seems to me the umbrella term to name “The Thing” is… Trust. This post seems to answer your confusion about the concept of Trust (socially intended), two years ago.
1. ^
  Maybe it’s because I’m French, but I don’t think “intimacy” is that confusing.

Antoine de Scorraille 25 Feb 2025 17:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Intellectual lifehacks repo
On a quick search, I couldn’t find such a repo. I agree that this is/was the heart of Lesswrong, but what I’m aiming for is more specific than ‘any cool intellectual thing’. A lot of LW’s posts are about contrarian viewpoints, or very particular topics. I’m looking for well-known but surprising stuff, to develop common knowledge.
Should feel like: ‘OMG, everyone should know [INSERT YOUR TRICK]’

[Question] Intellectual lifehacks repo

Antoine de Scorraille25 Feb 2025 16:32 UTC

11 points

16 comments1 min readLW link

Antoine de Scorraille 5 Jul 2024 17:32 UTC
5 points
−2
on: Minimalist And Maximalist Type Systems
Thanks for these last three posts!
Just sharing some vibe I’ve got from your.. framing!
Minimalism ~ path ~ inside-focused ~ the signal/reward
Maximalism ~ destination ~ outside-focused ~ the world
These two opposing aesthetics is a well-known confusing bit within agent foundation style research. The classical way to model an agent is to think as it is maximizing outside world variables. Conversely, we can think about minimization ~ inside-focused (reward hacking type error) as a drug addict accomplishing “nothing”
Feels there is also something to say with dopamine vs serotonine/homeostasis, even with deontology vs consequentialism, and I guess these two clumsy clusters mirrors each other in some way (feels isomorph by reverse signe function). Will rethink about it for now.
As an aside note: I’m French too, and was surprised I’m supposed to yuck maximalist aesthetic, but indeed it’s consistent with my reaction reading you about TypeScript, also with my K-type brain.. Anecdotally, not with my love for spicy/rich foods ^^′

Antoine de Scorraille 1 Jul 2024 14:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: Secondary forces of debt
Oh. As I read those first lines, I thought, “Isn’t it obvious?!!! How the hell did the author not notice that at like, 5 years old?” I mean, it’s such a common plot in fiction. And paradoxically, I thought I wasn’t good at knowing social dynamics. But maybe that’s an exception: I have a really good track record at guessing werewolves in the werewolf game. So maybe I’m just good at theory (very relevant to this game) but still bad at reading people.

The idea of applying it to wealth is interesting, though.

Antoine de Scorraille 28 Jun 2024 9:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Summary: Surreal Decisions
Me too :) But I then realized it’s not any “game”, but the combinatorial ones.

Antoine de Scorraille 27 May 2024 13:43 UTC
−2 points
0
on: Average utilitarianism is non-local
This.

Antoine de Scorraille 27 May 2024 13:28 UTC
3 points
0
on: Sum-threshold attacks
Excellent post! I think it’s closely related to (but not reducible to) to the general concept of Pressure. Both pressure as
- the physical definition (which is, indeed, a sum of many micro forces on a frontier surface, but able to affect at macroscale the whole object).
- the metaphorical common use of it (social pressure etc): see the post.

Antoine de Scorraille 27 May 2024 13:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Shishira’s comment on: Sum-threshold attacks
It’s not about bad intentions in most practical cases, but about biases. Hanlon’s razor doesn’t apply (or, very weakly) to systemic issues.

Antoine de Scorraille 29 Dec 2023 11:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: rotatingpaguro’s comment on: Game Theory without Argmax [Part 1]
It’s fixed ;)

Antoine de Scorraille 28 Dec 2023 14:25 UTC
2 points
0
on: Game Theory without Argmax [Part 1]
Exercise 1:

The empty set is the only one. For any nonempty set X, you could pick $z e r o_{X} = λ^{x \in X} . 0$ as a counterexample: $a r g m a x_{X} (z e r o_{X}) = X$

Exercise 2:

The agent will choose an option which scores better than the threshold $α$ .

It’s a generalization of satisficers, these latter are thresholders such as $u^{- 1} (α)$ is nonempty.

Exercise 3:

$m a j o r i t y_{X} = λ^{u : X \to R} . {x \in X | \forall x^{'} \in X, C a r d (u^{- 1} ({u (x)})) \geq C a r d (u^{- 1} ({u (x^{'})}))}$

Exercise 4:

I have discovered a truly marvelous-but-infinite solution of this, which this finite comment is too narrow to contain.

Exercise 5:

The generalisable optimisers are the following:

$a r g m i n_{X} = λ^{u : X \to R} . {x \in X | \forall x^{'} \in X, u (x) \leq u (x^{'}) ⟹ u (x^{'}) \leq u (x)}$

i.e. argmin will choose the minimal points.

$s a t i s f i c e_{s} = λ^{u : X \to R} . {x \in X | u (x) \geq u (s)}$

i.e. satisfice will choose an option $x \in X$ which dominates some fixed anchor point $s \in X$ . Note that since R is only equipped with a preorder, it means it might be a more selective optimiser (if not total, it’s harder to get an option better then the anchor). More interestingly, if there are indifferent options with the anchor (some x / $x \geq s$ and $s \geq x$ ), it could choose it rather than the anchor even if there is no gain to do so. This degree of freedom could be eventually not desirable.

$r o c k_{S} = λ^{u : X \to R} . S$

$s a t i s f i c e_{S} = λ^{u : X \to R} . {x \in X | \forall s \in S, u (x) \geq u (s)}$

$m a j o r i t y_{X} = λ^{u : X \to R} . {x \in X | \forall x^{'} \in X, C a r d (u^{- 1} ({u (x)})) \geq C a r d (u^{- 1} ({u (x^{'})}))}$

Exercise 6:

Interesting problem.

First of all, is there a way to generalize the trick?

The first idea would be to try to find some equivalent to the destested element $⊥$ . For context-dependant optimiser such as better-than-average, there isn’t.

A more general way to try to generalize the trick would be the following question:

For some fixed $ψ$ , $X_{l e g a l}$ and $u : X \to R$ , could we find some other $u^{'} : X \to R$ such as $ψ (u^{'}) = ψ (u)$ and $\forall x \in X_{l e g a l}, u^{'} (x) = u (x)$

i.e. is there a general way to replace values outside of $X_{l e g a l}$ without modify the result of the constrained optimisation?

Answer: no. Counter-example: The optimiser $m a j o r i t y_{X}$ for some infinite set X and finite nonempty sets $X_{l e g a l}$ and R.

So it seems there is no general trick here. But why bother? We should refocus on what we mean by constrained optimisation in general, and it has nothing to do with looking for some u’. What we mean is value outside $X_{l e g a l}$ are totally irrelevant.

How? For any of the current example we have here, what we actually want is not $ψ_{X} (u^{'})$ , but $ψ_{X_{l e g a l}} (u |_{X_{l e g a l}})$ : we only apply the optimiser on the legal set.

Problem: in the current formalism, an optimiser has type $(X \to R) \to X$ , so I don’t see obvious way to define the “same” optimiser on a different X. $a r g m a x_{X}$ and the others here are implicitly parametrized, so it’s not that a problem, but we have to specify this. This suggests to look for categories (e.g. $S e t$ for argmax...).

Antoine de Scorraille 28 Dec 2023 2:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: rotatingpaguro’s comment on: Game Theory without Argmax [Part 1]
Even with finite sets, it doesn’t work because the idea to look for “closest to $X_{l e g a l}$ ” is not what we looking for.

Let $X = {A l i c e; B o b; C h a r l i e}$ a class of students, scoring within a range $R = {0; 1; 2; 3; 4; 5}$ , $u : X \to R$ . Let $ψ$ the (uniform) better-than-average optimizer, standing for the professor picking any student who scores better than the mean.

Let $X_{l e g a l} = {A l i c e; B o b}$ (the professor $ψ$ despises Charlie and ignores him totally).

If u(Alice) = 5 and u(Bob) = 4, their average is 4.5 so only Alice should be picked by the constrained optimisation.

Howewer, with your proposal, you run into trouble with u’ defined as u’(Alice) = u(Alice), u’(Bob) = u(Bob), and u’(Charlie) = 0.

The average value for this u’ is $(5 + 4 + 0) / 3 = 3$ , and both Alice and Bob scores better than 3: $ψ (u^{'}) = {A l i c e; B o b} = X_{l e g a l}$ . The size of the intersection with $X_{l e g a l}$ is then maximal, so your proposal suggests to pick this set as the result. But the actual result should be ${A l i c e}$ , because the score of Charlie is irrelevant to constrained optimisation.

Antoine de Scorraille 3 Jun 2023 13:21 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Interpretability/Tool-ness/Alignment/Corrigibility are not Composable
Natural language is lossy because the communication channel is narrow, hence the need for lower-dimensional representation (see ML embeddings) of what we’re trying to convey. Lossy representations is also what Abstractions are about.
But in practice, you expect Natural Abstractions (if discovered) cannot be expressed in natural language?

Antoine de Scorraille 3 Jun 2023 13:16 UTC
4 points
0
on: Shannon’s Surprising Discovery
There is one catch: in principle, there could be multiple codes/descriptions which decode to the same message. The obvious thing to do is then to add up the implied probabilities of each description which produces the same message. That indeed works great. However, it turns out that just taking the minimum description length—i.e. the length of the shortest code/description which produces the message—is a good-enough approximation of that sum in one particularly powerful class of codes: universal Turing machines.

Is this about K-complexity is silly; use cross-entropy instead?

Antoine de Scorraille 3 Jun 2023 12:01 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Ivan Vendrov’s comment on: Interpretability/Tool-ness/Alignment/Corrigibility are not Composable
Do we really have such good interpretations for such examples? It seems to me that we have big problems in the real world because we don’t.
We do have very high-level interpretations, but not enough to have solid guarantees. After all, we have a very high-level trivial interpretation of our ML models: they learn! The challenge is not just to have clues, but clues that are relevant enough to address safety concerns in relation to impact scale (which is the unprecedented feature of the AI field).

Antoine de Scorraille 3 Jun 2023 11:29 UTC
3 points
2
on: Four levels of understanding decision theory
Pretty cool!
Just to add, although I think you already know: we don’t need to have a reflexive understanding of your DT to put it into practice, because messy brains rather than provable algo etc....
And I always feel it’s kinda unfair to dismiss as orthogonal motivations “valuing friendliness or a sense of honor” because they might be evolutionarily selected heuristics to (sort of) implement such acausal DT concerns!

Antoine de Scorraille 30 May 2023 8:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: K-complexity is silly; use cross-entropy instead
Great! Isn’t it generalizable to any argmin/argmax issues? Especialy thinking about the argmax decision theories framework, which is a well-known difficulty for safety concerns.
Similarly, in EA/action-oriented discussions, there is a reccurent pattern like:

Eager-to-act padawan: If world model/moral theory X is best likely to be true (due to evidence y z...), we need to act accordingly with the controversial Z! Seems best EU action!
Experienced jedi: Wait for a minute. You have to be careful with this way of thinking, because there are unkwown unknown, unilateralist curse and so on. A better decision-making procedure is to listen several models, severals moral theories, and to look for strategies acceptable by most of them.

Antoine de Scorraille

[Question] In­tel­lec­tual life­hacks repo

[Question] Intellectual lifehacks repo