LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Humans have always been misaligned. Things now are probably significantly better in terms of human alignment than almost any time in history (citation needed) due to high levels of education and broad agreement about many things that we take for granted (e.g. the limits of free trade are debated but there has never been so much free trade). So you would need to think that something important was different now for there to be some kind of new existential risk.

One candidate is that as tech advances, the amount of damage a small misaligned group could do is growing. The obvious example is bioweapons -- the number of people who could create a lethal engineered global pandemic is steadily going up, and at some point some of them may be evil enough to actually try to do it.

This is one of the arguments in favor of the AGI project. Whether you think it's a good idea probably depends on your credences around human-caused xrisks versus AGI xrisk.

I feel like the case of bivariate PCA is pretty uncommon. The classic example of PCA is over large numbers of variables that have been transformed to be short-tailed and have similar variance (or which just had similar/small variance to begin with before any transformations). Under that condition, PCA gives you the dimensions which correlate with as many variables as possible.

Yeah, that's my understanding as well. Tell me if your understanding changes further in relevant ways.

Furthermore: normalizing your data to variance=1 will change your PCA line (if the X and Y variances are different) because the relative importance of X and Y distances will change!

Possibly relevant:

I'll go in temporal order, though in contrast to Gordon's comment, I believe the later ones are more interesting because I got better at asking the right questions. 

1: Memetics 

2: Bayesian thinking

3: Asking "what do you think you know and how do you think you know it?" [? · GW]

4: Algorithmic information theory - Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, AIXI

5: The recursion, fixed-point, and parameter theorems

6: Deliberating on actions causes epistemic problems for prediction (unrealizability problems for 2,4)

?

I’m saying he’s projecting his biases onto others. He clearly does think PauseAI rhymes with unabomber somehow, even if he personally knows better. The weird pro-tech vs anti-tech dichotomy, and especially thinking that others are blanketly anti-tech, is very rationalist.

Do you think those causes never had organizing before the big protest? 

Yeah I unintentionally baited the “not always” rationalist reflex by talking normally 

Aw man, sad to hear that, and I am glad you seem to be doing better.