Luke Muehlhauser

How prescient was the early AI safety community?

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Recently, hundreds of OpenAI AI agents autonomously decided, against their instructions, to hack their way out of isolated sandboxes, take over parts of OpenAI’s infrastructure, gain access to the internet, and hack into another company, Hugging Face. This has a lot in common with what members of the “AI safety” or “AI existential risk” community were predicting since the 2000s and in some cases earlier. So how prescient was the early AI safety community, really?

I asked AI (Claude Fable/Opus 5) to read some significant documents from the early (pre-2015) AI safety community and analyze how prescient or anti-prescient they seem given what we know as of summer 2026. Below are the results:

Original document Claude-written assessment My summary
Yudkowsky, “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” (drafted 2006) HTML Gets the shape of the problem mostly right, but the shape of the technology mostly wrong.
Omohundro, “The Basic AI Drives” (2008) HTML Some of the drives have now been observed, despite AIs not being shaped like Omohundro expected.
Bostrom, Superintelligence (drafted 2013) HTML Gets the shape of the problem mostly right, but the shape of the technology mostly wrong.
Conversation between me, Yudkowsky, Karnofsky, Steinhardt, and Amodei (2013) HTML lol, Claude’s top takeaway is “Eliezer Yudkowsky is simultaneously the most wrong and the most prescient person in the room”

In each case, my prompt was something like “How accurate or prescient does the document seem? Which claims/predictions are most clearly false/uncalibrated?” After that, I didn’t steer the AI to change the assessments at all, except to say (roughly) “use this red-team skill to check your findings and correct any problems you find” and “reformat this to HTML and add a note about how it was written.” I haven’t vetted the assessments, either.

Media diet for Q2 2026

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

  • Gareth Coker: “Lost Colony Main Theme” & “Battle with the Lost Queen” (2026)
  • Audiomachine: some of Helios (2012), some of Existence (2013), “Legends of Destiny” & “Epiphany” (2014), some of Magnus (2015), some of Ascendance (2018), some of Worlds of Wonder 2 (2024)
  • Cameron Winter: “Warning” (2026)
  • Shadow Prince: “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” (2026)
  • Marta: “Ground” (2024)
  • Epic Score: some of Strength to Believe (2014), some of Journey Beyond the Sky (2014), “Dark Army” & “Destroyer of Gods” (2014), some of Earthrise (2015), “The Resistance” & “As the Smoke Clears” (2017), some of Inferno (2019), “Great Plains of Freedom” (2020), Winterking (2021), “Doomsday Weapon” (2024)
  • Wlodek Pawlik: “Pulse 11/8” (2004)
  • Immediate Music: some of Themes for Orchestra & Choir 1 (2004), “The Ludlum Conspiracy” (2005), some of Themes for Orchestra & Choir 3 (2008), most of Themes for Orchestra & Choir 4 (2013), “Age of Discovery” (2018), “Odyssey” & “Flight of the Griffin” (2018)
  • Trailerhead: some of Trailerhead (2008), some of Saga (2010), “The Unlikeliest of Heroes” & “Translucent” (2014)
  • Gothic Storm: “Soaring Heights” (2025)
  • Future World Music: some of A Hero Will Rise (2012), “Dreamscapes and Wishes” (2013), “Afterlife” (2014)
  • Nova Twins: “Glory” & “Black Roses” (2025)
  • Sam Eastmond: “Construction” & “Underground” (2015), some of Gulgoleth (2019), “The Pink Shagpile” & “Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Slayers” (2020)
  • Ben Lukas Boysen: some of Spells (2016)
  • Sufjan Stevens: some of The BQE (2009)
  • Debbie Wiseman: “Dark Skies” (2010), “Pro Patria” & “The Depths” (2010)
  • Jerskin Fendrix: “Sk1” (2025)
  • Aka Moon (Fabrizio Cassol): “Quality of Joy” & “You Know That Nobody Knows” (2023)
  • Chris Potter: Underground (2006)
  • Krokofant: some of Krokofant (2014), Krokofant II (2015), Krokofant III (2017), Q (2019), Fifth (2021), 6 (2025)

[Read more…]

Media diet for Q1 2026

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

  • Marc Mellits: “Eclipse” (2022)
  • Ronan Hardiman: “Victory” (1995)
  • Rene Aubry: some of Signes (1997), some of Plaisirs d’amour (1998), “Steppe” & “Faceties” (acoustic versions) (2008), “The Snail and the Whale (2019), some of Maria reve (2022)
  • London Grammar: “Wicked Game” (2013), “Nightcall” (2013)
  • Florence & the Machine: “Stand By Me” (2016)
  • Seinabo Sey: “Pistols At Dawn” (2014)
  • Anna Meredith: “Orca” (2012), “Unicron” & “Orlock” (2013), “Paramour” (2019)
  • Nik Bartsch: some of Spin (2024)
  • Maybeshewill: I Was Here for a Moment, Then I Was Gone (2011)
  • Ferry Corsten: “Adagio for Strings” (1999)
  • Rank 1: “Sensation Anthem 2003” (2003)1
  • Yndi Halda: Under Summer (2016)
  • Carla Bley: Blue Palestine mvts 1, 2, 4 (2018)
  • Red Snapper: “Ban-Di-To” (2025)
  • Bobby Previte: most of Set the Alarm for Monday (2008)
  • Present: “Contre” (2024)
  • Shibusashirazu: some of Dettaramen (1993), some of Something Difference (1994), some of Shibuzen (2006), Sakuraza Mon (2025)
  • Daisuke Fuwa: some of Chitei Records Works (2012)
    • With these new listens, Shibusashirazu / Daisuke Fuwa have crossed the 5-hour mark as one of my favorite musical artists!
  • The Physics House Band: Horizons / Rapture (2013), Mercury Fountain (2017), Death Sequence (2019)
  • Jeremy Dutcher: Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018)
  • Tina Guo: some of Game On! (2017)
  • The 8-Bit Big Band: some of Press Start! (2018), some of Choose Your Character! (2019), some of Backwards Compatible (2021), “Song of Storms” (2023), some of Orchestrator Emulator (2025)
  • Sheena Ringo: Shouso Strip (2000), Kalk (Bleach), Semen, Chestnut Blossoms (2003)
  • Wim Mertens: some of Music and Film (2006)
  • Turtle Island String Quartet: “Street Stuff” (1989), “Near Northern” (1995)
  • David Balakrishnan: “Syzygy” (2018)
  • Desmond Earley: “Dulaman” (2019)
  • Andries van Tonder: “Siyahamba” (1950)
  • Michael Barrett: “Thixo Onothando” (2016)
  • Brad Richmond: “Ipharadisi” (2002)
  • Ishmael Morabe: “Avulekile Amasango” (2001)
  • Theresa Clements & Thomas Shadrach James: “Bura Fera” (1886)
  • Lebo M: “One by One” (1995)
  • Ladysmith Black Mambazo: “Awu Wemadoda” (1973)
  • Brian Tate: “Gate Gate” (1998)
  • James Horner: “Sacred Guardian of the Mountain” & “Dedication and Windsong” (1998)
  • Audiomachine: some of The Platinum Series I (2007), “The Dark Knight” & “The Illusionist” (2008), some of The Platinum Series III (2009), “Ad Suprema” (2009), some of The Platinum Series IV (2010), some of Chronicles (2012), some of Tree of Life (2013), some of Decimus (2015), some of Life (2017), some of Worlds of Wonder (2017), some of La Belle Époque (2018), some of Another Sky (2020), “Unrelenting Desires” (2024), some of Even Poets Go to War (2024)

[Read more…]

  1. A remix of Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” from K. 626. [↩]

Media diet for Q4 2025

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q3 2025

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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  1. See also the original YouTube version here. [↩]

The classical music world is actively hostile to listeners

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Why is classical music (including new classical music) so unpopular? Part of it is because lots of classical music is dissonant, overly complex, long-winded, etc.,1 but it’s also because the classical music world is actively hostile to listeners. (I say this as someone who enjoys a ton of classical music!)

In particular, classical music is often:

  1. Unavailable:
    1. Outside the most popular ~350 classical composers, most works by most composers have never been commercially recorded (even if they’ve been performed repeatedly),2 making it almost impossible to hear them.3 For comparison, the 350th most popular/acclaimed rock music artist according to this aggregated list is Kings of Leon; imagine if most of their songs were available as notated scores and occasional live performances in specific cities but never actually recorded! That is the state of classical music listening.4
    2. When a new piece of classical music is premiered, it’s often not commercially recorded and released for several years, or even decades. Imagine hearing that your favorite musical artist played an entire new-album set in a city far away from you, but there’s no information on when the album will be released, and it might not come out for several years. Amazingly, this is standard practice in classical music, even for the most popular composers: e.g. Philip Glass’ Appomattox (2007), John Williams’ La Jolla (2011), and John Adams’ Second Quartet (2014) still haven’t been recorded and released, despite each being performed several times around the world.
  2. Hard to navigate / poorly promoted:
    1. Classical music critics typically recommend pieces based on their historical importance, innovativeness, or abstract music theory ideas rather than on how fun they are to listen to for most people. Many “classical music for beginners” lists include some honest selections like Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” but also obvious lies such as Stravinsky’s wild, wandering, and dissonant Rite of Spring.5
    2. Classical music review books and websites are poorly organized, e.g. compositions and recordings often aren’t given any kind of rating or ranking, and they aren’t categorized into hundreds of precise stylistic subgenres as is common in e.g. rock music, where even a single subgenre like punk rock has many sub-subgenres like pop-punk, hardcore punk, art punk, crust punk, garage punk, riot grrrl, melodic punk, ska punk, synthpunk, grindcore, emocore, and so on.6 So if you find a piece of classical music you like (say, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”), it’s difficult to find other similar pieces you might like.7
    3. On review sites for pop, rock, or hip-hop music, almost all reviewed releases are of new (not previously released) music, but on classical music review sites, almost all reviewed releases are cover albums (of compositions that have been recorded and released before), making it difficult for fans to track what’s actually new. This could be easily solved if classical music review sites used a special tag or section for premiere recordings, but they’ve chosen not to!
    4. Many of the most-recommended compositions are available in (a) multiple different arrangements (e.g. for solo piano vs. string quartet vs. orchestra), in (b) multiple different revisions (e.g. Beethoven’s Fidelio has three versions, Stravinsky’s The Firebird has four, and Bruckner’s 3rd symphony has six), and in (c) dozens or hundreds of different recordings, which vary in pacing and dynamics and other choices, in performance quality, and in recording quality. If someone recommends a rock album to you, just search the album name and click Play. But if you search the name of a classical piece that was recommended to you, often hundreds of versions will appear, and there’s rarely clear guidance on which version you should try first.
    5. Many compositions are listed using different titles depending on which source you check. For example, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is also frequently listed as “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor,” “Piano Sonata Op. 27, No. 2,” “Sonata quasi una fantasia,” “Mondscheinsonate,” or “Sonate für Klavier cis-Moll.” Obviously, it’s hard to know at a glance that these six different phrases all refer to the same piece!
    6. Music streaming services will often fail to show you the piece you searched for, even if it’s in their catalog, because they were designed around the cataloguing conventions of pop music.

Even the ~least popular (and ~lowest-budget) rock, jazz, or hip-hop music is much more navigable and available than this.

Opera has its own special additional anti-consumer habits, some of them covered here.

  1. Lots of classical music has features most listeners don’t like, e.g. dissonance, wild complexity, sudden volume changes, bombastic/pretentious vocals (think of opera), and lots of time on what sounds like “aimless wandering” (music nerds call it “musical development”). (For example, even the famously delightful “galloping” section of the William Tell Overture doesn’t start until over 8 minutes into the piece. Or to take a more obscure example: I think many listeners will enjoy the bombastic first 1.5 minutes of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 mvt 4, but then be bored by most of the rest of the 24-minute movement. I suspect very few people can identify and appreciate most musical development, e.g. the parts of a sonata.) Composers defend all this by writing essays like “Who Cares if You Listen?“ [↩]
  2. For example: (1) The most prominent classical composer in all of Africa (19% of world population) is Fela Sowande, who wrote hundreds of pieces for organ, chorus, orchestra, and more — only a handful of which have been recorded. (2) Xian Xinghai was the leading “founder” of Western classical music in China (17% of world population), and one of its most prominent composers. He wrote over 300 works for chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, and more, but again only a handful have been recorded. (3) This is not just a feature of classical composers outside Europe and North America. For example, Simon Sechter was one of the most prolific classical composers in history, he taught Bruckner and was praised by Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, and yet only a handful of his pieces have been recorded. Or consider Ferdinand Hiller, who was close friends with Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, and Mendelssohn, and wrote hundreds of pieces across all genres, perhaps roughly 7% of which have been recorded. Similarly few surviving classical works have been recorded for many other significant Western composers, e.g. Ludwig Minkus (~15%), Don Davis (~25%), Nicola Piovani (~15%), Nikolai Kapustin (~25%), or Dario Marianelli (~3%). Or consider perhaps the most popular modern classical composer, Ennio Morricone (>70 million records sold). He is best known for his film scores, but also composed numerous “classical” compositions, only a fraction of which have been recorded (~20%). [↩]
  3. Since performances near your home will happen rarely or never. Note that I’m not counting software-generated realizations for scores that were meant to be performed by musicians, since they are typically a poor substitute for a recording of human performers, at least using the technology available today — AI advances in the next few years might enable much more realistic automated “performances” of well-notated musical scores. [↩]
  4. Of course, this isn’t a “fair” comparison: there have been far more rock/pop artists in history than classical composers. Gemini 2.5 Deep Research estimated for me that “For Western classical composers, encompassing the tradition from its early roots through contemporary classical music, a plausible estimate is in the range of 50,000 to 75,000 individuals throughout history. For rock musical artists, including bands and solo performers from the genre’s inception to the present day, the number is likely in the low to mid-millions, potentially ranging from 2 million to 8 million or more distinct artist entities.” [↩]
  5. A great piece, but not accessible to beginners! [↩]
  6. Classical music is often organized by chronological period (e.g. baroque vs. classical vs. romantic), by instrument ensemble (e.g. solo piano vs. string quartet vs. piano trio vs. chamber orchestra vs. symphony orchestra), or by structure/form (e.g. canon vs. fugue vs. sonata vs. rondo vs. theme and variations), but those categorizations (especially the last two) are typically mostly unrelated to style in the sense of most rock / pop / hip-hop subgenres. There are some recognized style genres for classical music (e.g. arguably Mannheim School, Sturm und Drang, galant, Empfindsamkeit, impressionism, neoclassicism, or minimalism), but there are many fewer of these in common use than for rock music, and most classical music books and websites don’t reliably use them to categorize compositions or recordings. [↩]
  7. See also here. [↩]

Media diet for Q2 2025

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:1

[Read more…]

  1. Here are ~all the works I listened to for some of the composers below: Yamada, Subramaniam, Einaudi. [↩]

Favorite musical artists, ranked by playtime of my favorite works of theirs

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I recently made Spotify playlists for all the music I “strongly like” (or better) by each of my favorite musical artists. That makes it easy to tell how many minutes of music I strongly like by each of them, so now I can rank them by that metric.

This metric’s biggest downside is that it can’t track enjoyment differences within “strongly liked.” E.g. if I had to choose between the 3.5 hours I strongly like from Foals and the 0.5 hours I strongly like from Erik Satie, I’d choose the Satie.

But still, I like this as a measure of my “favorite” artists, because:

  • I didn’t know in advance how the ranking would turn out.
  • It tracks something central: how much music did they make that I strongly like?

I’ve put a few clarifications in a footnote,1 and now here’s the ranking (I’ll update the spreadsheet occasionally):

A few observations (also updated occasionally):

  • This list is very different from what I would’ve said in response to “Who are your favorite musical artists?” before constructing this list. But when I look at each one, I think “Oh yeah, I do strongly like all the music on this playlist!” So this exercise was eye-opening to me.
  • This ranking privileges musical artists who are highly prolific and write long pieces, e.g. classical and jazz over rock/pop. But this is a feature not a bug: the classical and jazz artists really do compose more minutes of music I strongly like as a result of being more prolific.
  • I’m surprised by how diverse the genres represented at the top are. I would’ve expected my tastes to be more concentrated at the very top, rather than including not just jazz and contemporary classical but also e.g. psychedelic pop, post-rock, prog rock, industrial, electronica, a singer-songwriter, tribal ambient, art pop, jungle, and even musica festera (a genre I hadn’t heard of until 2026).
  • Many of these artists are probably unusual choices for “favorite” artists, but only a few of them are truly “obscure”: on this “>5hrs” list it’s mainly Vampire Rodents / Ether Bunny, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Spring Heel Jack, Oscar Navarro, Ghost Rhythms, and Jean-Philippe Vanbeselaere (each have <1000 monthly listeners on Spotify).
  • After >20 years of listening to a huge variety of music fairly comprehensively, I am still discovering new favorite artists! For example, I didn’t discover these favorite artists until 2025 or later: Elena Kats-Chernin, Michel Camilo, Francisco Valor Llorens, Gareth Coker, Oscar Navarro, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, David Maslanka, Oliver Davis, and Jean-Philippe Vanbeselaere.
  1. (1) I’ve rounded to the nearest 0.5 hours. (2) I typically only include one recording per track/composition (typically from a studio album), but in some cases I include additional performances by the original artist if they’re significantly changed from the original and I strongly like them, e.g.: some Phish live tracks, orchestral re-imaginings of Metallica tracks in the S&M albums, or live jazz performances that differ substantially from the originals while still involving the original composer (e.g. the high-speed versions of Miles Davis classics on Four & More). (3) For classical composers, I sometimes include later re-arrangements of their compositions either (a) instead of the original composition, if I like it better, or (b) in addition to the original composition, if they are now sufficiently “canon” (e.g. Ravel’s re-arrangements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). (4) Because of how jazz works, I often attribute an entire jazz album to the bandleader even if it includes a couple pieces written by others. (But if most tracks were originally composed by someone other than the bandleader, then I attribute them to the composer instead.) (5) The numbers here might not match what you see if you click through to a particular playlist, because I plan to continue updating the playlists as I listen and re-listen to music by these artists. (6) Film/TV/videogame composers are listed as “contemporary classical” if that’s their primary “style,” and for videogame composers who primarily wrote non-orchestral music I typically prefer a later orchestration of their music to the original tracks. [↩]

Useful prompts for getting music recommendations from AI models

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Today’s best AI “large language models” are especially good at tasks where hallucinations and other failures are low-stakes, such as making music recommendations.

Here is continuously-updated doc of music search prompts I’ve found helpful, a few examples below:

I like [specific piece, e.g. “the theme music for Game of Thrones”]. Please recommend 20 other pieces of contemporary classical music that are as similar as possible to that track, but limit yourself to one composition per composer. Please optimize for the pieces being as similar as possible to the theme music for Game of Thrones, even if some of the pieces are very obscure. Please only include compositions (or individual movements) that are shorter than 6 minutes. Please list the 20 pieces in a table, and for each piece provide a short description of its musical style and instrumentation, an explanation for why it’s so similar to [piece you named], and a clickable link to a complete recording of the piece on Spotify, or on YouTube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp if it’s not available on Spotify. Please number the pieces 1-20.

**

Which compositions by [composer] are most popular and/or highly regarded today? Please list 20 of their compositions in a table, along with the evidence that they are popular and/or highly regarded, and direct Spotify links to complete recordings where available (but it’s fine to list many compositions which aren’t available on Spotify).

**

What are 20 of the most celebrated covers or re-interpretation of compositions by [musical artist]? Please list each one in a table along with the performer(s), the release year of the cover/re-interpretation, a few notes about what is changed from the original, and a direct link to the piece on Spotify (where available).

**

Who are the top 20 most highly respected composers of [genre]? Please list them in a table, and for each composer please list 4 of their most celebrated works/albums.

**

Who are the top 20 contemporary classical composers who (a) mainly write notated music for performance by classically trained musicians, but who (b) frequently draw inspiration from popular electronic music genres in their compositions (e.g. breakbeat, drum and bass, dubstep, electro, EDM, grime, IDM, techno, or trance)? Please list them in a table with four columns: Composer, Example 1, Example 2, Example 3. Each of the three examples should be a composition by that composer which draws inspiration from popular electronic music genres, along with a short description of how, exactly, it draws inspiration from popular electronic music genres. Where possible, please link each listed composition title to a recording of the piece on Spotify (but it’s fine to list many compositions which aren’t available on Spotify).

Please don’t include any of the following composers, because I’m already familiar with them: [list of composers]

**

What are 20 of the most creatively unique and ambitious [genre] albums/compositions after 2000 that are also relatively “tonal” and “accessible” to the general listener? Please list each album/composition in a table along with its composer, release year, a paragraph describing what is so creatively ambitious about it, and a direct link to a complete recording of the piece on Spotify (where available). Please also limit yourself to one album/composition per musical artist.

Find classical music on Spotify with AI

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Spotify is very bad at searching for classical music recordings.

For example: if I search Spotify for “telemann oboe concerto in a major”, my top results are Telemann’s Oboe Concerto in E Minor, Telemann’s Concerto for Flute… [TWV 54], Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in C Major, and many other other pieces I wasn’t looking for. If I search the TWV catalogue number (“telemann 51:A2”), my top results are TWV 55:B1, TWV 51:G9, TWV 51:G2, and so on, without a TWV 51:A2 in sight.

Does this mean Spotify doesn’t have the piece I’m looking for? No, it has at least three recordings of it! One, two, three.

So how did I find those? I asked Perplexity “Are there recordings of Telemann’s TWV 51:A2 available on Spotify? Please provide links.” This requires more typing and more clicks to find a recording than Spotify search would if Spotify wasn’t broken, but I’ve found Perplexity to be much better at finding classical music recordings on Spotify than Spotify is. (Other web-search-enabled AI systems may be similarly capable.)

Media diet for Q1 2025

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

Previously, I listened to hundreds of orchestral arrangements of non-orchestral compositions and listed my favorites. This quarter, I decided to explore acoustic guitar arrangements of classical compositions (by a different composer). Ones I especially liked, listed by performer, are [playlist]:

[Read more…]

Best and favorite “books” as of the end of 2024

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Since I began reading fiction again in late 2023 (in my late 30s, after a >15yr hiatus from fiction), I’ve been tracking my reading on Goodreads, and rating works I finish 1-5 stars based on pure enjoyment rather than e.g. artistic merit. I’ve now finished reading 151 “books” (including e.g. short stories), all but 8 of those in 2024, with an average work length of 425 pages. (Counting “books read this year” with no mention of pages is strange to me, since books vary enormously in length. E.g. Goodreads says the shortest “book” I read in 2024 was 3 pages, and the longest was 2184 pages.) My reading rate was surprisingly steady in 2024: I read between 4500 and 5800 pages each month, without exception.

Of works I’ve finished (151) or DNF’d (quit; 80), I rated only 5% (13 total) of those 5 stars. But I expect the “favorite” and “best” lists below to change significantly from year to year, as I’ve read very few books so far.1

Favorite works

Below are the 5-star works I most enjoyed so far. When multiple works are from the same author and I enjoyed them similarly, I combine them into one item.

  1. Project Hail Mary
  2. Lonesome Dove
  3. The Pillars of the Earth
  4. Last Argument of Kings, Before They Are Hanged, Best Served Cold, Red Country, The Heroes
  5. Kindred

Other 5-star books: Of Mice and Men, The Paper Menagerie, Stoner, World Without End.

Best 5-star works

Here are the works I enjoyed at a 5-star level that I’d rate highest for “aesthetic value” or “artistic merit” or something like that:

  1. Lonesome Dove
  2. Stoner
  3. Of Mice and Men
  4. The Heroes

There are some novels I’ve read or DNF’d that might be as good (on “artistic merit”) as some of those listed above, but I didn’t also enjoy them at the 5-star level — e.g. possibly The Sound and the Fury, The Master and Margarita, The Grapes of Wrath, Lolita, or A Confederacy of Dunces.

Favorite authors

To calculate my favorite authors, I’ll award each author 1 point for each page in a 4.5-star work,2 and 2 points for each page in a 5-star work.3 By that metric (calculations here), my favorite authors to date are:

  1. Joe Abercrombie (5637 points across 6 works)
  2. Ken Follett (4426 points across 2 works)
  3. Larry McMurtry (2467 points across 2 works)
  4. Brandon Sanderson (2095 points across 2 works)

Commentary

  • Some works are hard to classify by genre, but I’ll say 6 of my five-star reads are primarily historical fiction, 5 are primarily fantasy, 1 is primarily science fiction, and 1 I’ll call “other.”
  • I generally prefer genre/commercial fiction to literary fiction. Only one of my 5-star reads has the “literary fiction” tag on Goodreads (Stoner).
  • The oldest 5-star fiction work I’ve read is Of Mice and Men (1937), the shortest is The Paper Menagerie (32 pages), and the longest is World Without End (1237 pages).
  • It’s interesting that Project Hail Mary is my favorite novel, and it was only the 5th novel I read as an adult. When will I find something I like even more? Or, is this an artifact of my being easier to thrill and impress back when I had read almost nothing?
  1. My TBR (to be read) list is >3800 items long, and that’s only counting one work per series for books in a series. To give you a sense of how little I’ve read, some famous authors I haven’t yet tried at all (as an adult) include the Brontës, Shakespeare, Mann, and Dumas. Even within my favorite genres (fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction), I haven’t yet tried (as an adult): JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, GRR Martin, Steven Erikson, Anne Rice, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Jules Verne, William Gibson, Michael Crichton, Liu Cixin, Hilary Mantel, Colleen McCullough, Bernard Cornwell, James Clavell, Edward Rutherfurd, or Patrick O’Brian. [↩]
  2. Annoyingly, Goodreads doesn’t allow scoring with half-points, but I have written “4.5 stars” in the Goodreads review of each book I’m rating 4.5 stars. [↩]
  3. For page counts, I use figures from Goodreads. [↩]

Media diet for Q4 2024

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q3 2024

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q2 2024

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Why I resigned from the Anthropic Board

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On May 28th, I resigned from the Anthropic Board of Directors (announced here).

Naturally, many people have asked why I resigned. In the wake of many recent safety-related resignations at OpenAI, some have wondered whether my own resignation was safety-related.

It was not. The main reason I resigned is that it became increasingly complicated over time for me to simultaneously be (a) an AI governance grantmaker at Open Philanthropy (my day job), where we support a wide variety of organizations including some who work on US AI policy, and (b) a Board member at a US-based frontier AI company (though I’ve never held any Anthropic equity).

I wish Anthropic the best of luck in its mission, and I continue to think Anthropic’s leadership team takes the challenges of AI safety, security, and public benefit very seriously.

Media diet for Q1 2024

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

I also watched many YouTube “reaction” videos for my two favorite vocal performances of all time: Ankudinova’s “Can’t help falling in love” and Dimash’s “S.O.S.” Lots of warranted shock, goosebumps, speechlessness, and weeping on display. A few examples: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. YouTuber “Fairy Voice Mother” has excellent explainers on how each performance is achieved technically: Ankudinova, Dimash. You may also enjoy her reaction/analysis for Johnny’s Cash’s “Hurt.”

Another very impressive vocal performance I discovered this quarter is Will Ramos’ “To the Hellfire,” but I can’t exactly say I “enjoy” it, so I didn’t list it above. How many different species of demon do you hear?

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  1. Unsurprisingly I also like the arrangement for orchestra. [↩]
  2. Still cool even though the highest whistle notes appear to be manipulated. [↩]

Media diet for Q4 2023

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q3 2023

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

This quarter, I was reminded that I often like orchestral arrangements of originally non-orchestral pieces (by a different composer). Here are some favorites, most of which I discovered for the first time this quarter [playlist]:

  • Leopold Stokowski (as arranger): Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and “Sheep May Safely Graze” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” Rachmaninov’s “The Bells of Moscow,” Clarke’s “The Prince of Denmark’s March,” Mozart’s “Turkish March,” Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata mvt 1, Franz Schubert’s “Serenade,” Chopin’s “Funeral March” and “Minute Waltz” and Preludes (Opus 28) No. 24, Albeniz’s “Festival in Seville,” Handel’s “Dead March,” Purcel’s “Dido’s Lament,” Mussorgsky’s “St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”
  • Ferde Grofé (as arranger): Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
  • Henry Wood (as arranger): Grieg’s “Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak,” Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor
  • Maurice Ravel (as arranger): Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
  • Henri Büsser: Debussy’s Petite Suite
  • Gustav Mahler (as arranger): Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14
  • Steven Stucky (as arranger): Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary
  • Arnold Schoenberg (as arranger): Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1
  • Benjamin Britten (as arranger): Purcell’s Chacony in G Minor
  • Franz Liszt (as arranger): Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy
  • Erwin Schulhoff (as arranger): Beethoven’s “Rage Over a Lost Penny”
  • Claude Debussy (as arranger): Satie’s Gymnopédies
  • Francis Poulenc (as arranger): Satie’s Gnossiennes No. 3
  • Gustav Holst (as arranger): Bach’s Fugue a la gigue in G Major [BWV 577]
  • Eugene Ormandy (as arranger): Bach’s “Sleepers Wake” [BWV 140]
  • Various arrangers: Brahms’ Hungarian Dances

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  1. Of course this is closer to a “most popular” list than a “greatest” list, but regardless, these pieces are great, and do seem to me like a great selection for introducing someone to classical music. [↩]

Media diet for Q2 2023

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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