Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Is There Anything That's Worth More", published by Zack M Davis on August 2, 2023 on LessWrong.

In season two, episode twenty-four of Steven Universe, "It Could've Been Great", our magical alien superheroine protagonists (and Steven) are taking a break from building a giant drill to extract a superweapon that was buried deep within the Earth by an occupying alien race thousands of years ago, which is predicted to emerge and destroy the planet soon.

While our heroines watch the sunset, Peridot (who alerted them to the buried superweapon) expresses frustration that the group isn't still working. Steven defends their leisure: "Working hard is important, but feeling good is important, too," he says. He then goads Peridot into a musical number, which includes a verse from her explaining her attitude towards the situation and her forced compatriots:

I guess we're already here I guess already know We've all got something to fear We've all got nowhere to go I think you're all insane But I guess I am, too Anybody would be if they were stuck on Earth with you

"It Could've Been Great" aired in 2016. At the time, I agreed with Peridot: with the fate of the planet on the line, our heroines and Steven should have been burning the midnight oil. If they succeeded at disarming the superweapon, they'd have plenty of time to rest up afterward, but if they failed, there would be no more time for them.

Now, as the long May 2020 turns into March 2023, I'm starting to think that Steven had a point.

It would be one thing if our heroines knew with certainty that the superweapon would go off at a given date and time, presenting a definite do-or-die deadline. But all they had to go on was Peridot's warning. Attempting a speculative technical project to avert uncertain doom with an uncertain deadline, their planning had to average over many possible worlds - including worlds where the problem of survival was too easy or too hard for their efforts to matter, such that even the utility of leisure in the present moment was enough to sway the calculation.

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Deep Report on Hypertension, published by Joel Tan (CEARCH) on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Taking into account (a) the expected benefits of eliminating hypertension, in terms of improved health and increased economic output, while also factoring in (b) the expected costs on the economic front and (c) the tractability of advocacy for top sodium reduction policies (i.e. a sodium tax; mandatory food reformulation; a strategic location intervention; a public education campaign; and front-of-pack labelling) to prevent and ameliorate hypertension, CEARCH finds the marginal expected value of advocacy for these top sodium reduction policies to control hypertension to be 88,052 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is at least 10x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity.

Our detailed cost-effectiveness analysis can be found here, as can the full report can be read here.

Introduction: This report on hypertension is the culmination of three iterative rounds of research: (i) an initial shallow research round involving 1 week of desktop research; (ii) a subsequent intermediate research round involving 2 weeks of desktop research and expert interviews; and (iii) a final deep research round involving 3 weeks of desktop research, expert interviews, and the commissioning of surveys and quantitative modelling.

Importance: Globally, hypertension is certainly a problem, and causes a significant health burden of 248 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in 2024, as well as an accompanying net economic burden equivalent to 748 million foregone doublings of GDP per capita, each of which people typically value at around 1/5th of a year of healthy life. And the problem is only expected to grow between 2024 and 2100, as a result of factors like high sodium consumption, ageing, and population growth.

Neglectedness: Government policy is far from adequate, with only 4% of countries currently implementing the top WHO-recommended ideas on sodium reduction, and this not expected to change much going forward - based on the historical track record, any individual country has only a 1% chance per annum of introducing such policies. At the same time, while there are NGOs working on hypertension and sodium reduction (e.g. in China, India and Latin America) - and while some are impact-oriented in focusing on poorer countries where the disease is growing far more rapidly than in wealthier countries - fundamentally, not enough is being done.

Tractability: There are many potential solutions to the problem of hypertension (e.g. reducing dietary sodium, increasing potassium consumption, and pharmacological agents); however, we find that the most cost-effective solution is likely to be advocacy for top sodium reduction policies - specifically: a sodium tax; mandatory food reformulation; a strategic location intervention to change food availability in public institutions like hospitals, schools, workplaces and nursing homes; a public education campaign; and front-of-pack labelling. The theory of change behind this intervention package is as such:

Step 1: Lobby a government to implement top sodium reduction policies.

Step 2a: Sodium tax reduces sodium consumption.

Step 2b: Mandatory food reformulation reduces sodium consumption.

Step 2c: Strategic location intervention reduces sodium consumption.

Step 2d: Public education reduces sodium consumption.

Step 2e: Mandatory front-of-pack labelling reduces sodium consumption.

Step 3: Lower sodium consumption in a single country reduces blood pressure and hence the global disease burden of hypertension

Using the track record of past sodium control and sugar tax advocacy efforts and of general lobbying attempts (i.e. an "outside view"), and combining this with reasoning through the particulars of the case (i.e. an "inside view"), our bes...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Riesgos Catastróficos Globales needs funding, published by Jaime Sevilla on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Riesgos Catastróficos Globales (RCG) is a science-policy nonprofit investigating opportunities to improve the management of Global Catastrophic Risks in Spanish-Speaking countries.

I wrote a previous update back in May. Since then, the organisation has published seven more articles, including a report on Artificial Intelligence regulation in the context of the EU AI Act sandbox. We have also been invited to contribute to the 2024-2030 National Risk Management Plan of Argentina, which will consequently be the world's first to include a section on abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS).

Unfortunately, our major fundraising efforts have been unsuccessful. We are only able to keep operating due to some incredibly generous donations by private individuals. We are looking to fundraise $87k to support our operations between October 2023 and March 2024. If you are a funder, you can contact us through [email protected] . Individuals can help extend our runway through a donation.

Reasons to support Riesgos Catastróficos Globales

I believe that RCG is an incredible opportunity for impact. Here are some reasons why.

We have already found promising avenues to impact. We have officially joined the public risk management network in Argentina, and we have been invited to contribute an entry on abrupt sun-reducing scenarios (ASRS) to the 2024-2030 national risk management plan.

RCG has shown to be amazingly productive. Since the new team started operating in March we have published two large reports and ten articles. Another large report is currently undergoing review, and we are working on three articles we plan to submit to academic journals. This is an unusually high rate of output for a new organization.

RCG is the only Spanish-Speaking organisation producing work on Global Catastrophic Risks studies. I believe that our reports on Artificial Winter and Artificial Intelligence are the best produced in the language. Of particular significance is our active engagement with Latin American countries, which are otherwise not well represented in conversations about global risk.

We are incubating some incredible talent. Our staff includes competent profiles who in a short span of time have gained in-depth expertise in Global Catastrophic Risks. This would have been hard to acquire elsewhere, and I am very excited about their careers.

In sum, I am very excited about the impact we are having and the work that is happening in Riesgos Catastróficos Globales. Keep reading to learn more about it!

Status update

Here are updates on our main lines of work.

Artificial Winter. We have joined the Argentinian Register of Associations for Comprehensive Risk Management (RAGIR), and we will be contributing a section on managing abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS) to the 2024-2030 National Risk Management Plan. We continue promoting public engagement with the topic, having recently published a summary infographic of our report. We also are preparing a related submission to an academic journal.

Artificial Intelligence. We have published our report on AI governance in the context of the EU AI Act sandbox, as well as companion infographics. A member of the European parliament has agreed to write a prologue for the report. In parallel, we have been engaging with the discussion around the AI Act through calls for feedback. We are also currently preparing two submissions to academic journals related to risks and regulation of AI.

Biosecurity. We have drafted a report on biosurveillance and contention of emergent infectious diseases in Guatemala, which is currently undergoing expert review. It will be published in August. We are also writing a short article o...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Implementational Considerations for Digital Consciousness, published by Derek Shiller on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This post is a summary of my conclusions after a philosophical project investigating some aspects of computing architecture that might be relevant to assessing digital consciousness. I tried to approach the issues in a way that is useful to people with mainstream views and intuitions. Overall, I think that present-day implementational considerations should significantly reduce the probability most people assign to the possibility of conscious digital systems using current architectural and programming paradigms.

The project was funded by the Long Term Future Fund.

Key claims and synopses of the rationale for each:

1. Details of the implementation of computer systems may be important to how confident we are about their capacity for consciousness.

Experts are unlikely to come to agree that a specific theory of consciousness is correct and epistemic humility demands that we keep an open mind.

Some plausible theories will make consciousness dependent on aspects of implementation.

The plausible implementational challenges to digital consciousness should influence our overall assessment of the likelihood of digital consciousness.

2. If computer systems are capable of consciousness, it is most likely that some theory of the nature of consciousness in the ballpark of functionalism is true.

Brains and computers are composed of fundamentally different materials and operate at low levels in fundamentally different ways.

Brains and computers share abstract functional organizations, but not their material composition.

If we don't think that functional organizations play a critical role in assessing consciousness, we have little reason to think computers could be conscious.

3. A complete functionalist theory of consciousness needs two distinct components: 1) a theory of what organizations are required for consciousness and 2) a theory of what it takes to implement an organization.

An organization is an abstract pattern - it can be treated as a set of relational claims between the states of a system's various parts.

Whether a system implements an organization depends on what parts it has, what properties belong to those parts, and how those properties depend on each other over time.

There are multiple ways of interpreting the parts and states of any given physical system. Even if we know what relational claims define an organization, we need to know how it is permissible to carve up a system to assess whether the system implements that organization.

4. There are hypothetical systems that can be interpreted as implementing the organization of a human brain that are intuitively very unlikely to be conscious.

See examples in section 4.

5. To be plausible, functionalism should be supplemented with additional constraints related to the integrity of the entities that can populate functional organizations.

Philosophers have discussed the need for such constraints and some possible candidates, but there has been little exploration of the details of those constraints or what they mean for hypothetical artificial systems.

There are many different possible constraints that would help invalidate the application of functional organizations to problematic systems in different ways.

The thread tying together different proposals is that functional implementation is constrained by the cohesiveness or integrity of a system's component parts that play the roles in the implementations of functional organizations.

Integrity constraints are independently plausible.

6.) Several plausible constraints would prevent digital systems from being conscious even if they implemented the same functional organization as a human brain, supposing that they did so with current techni...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Reflections on my time on the Long-Term Future Fund, published by abergal on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm stepping down as chair of the Long-Term Future Fund. I'm writing this post partially as a loose set of reflections on my time there, and partially as an overall update on what's going on with the fund, as I think we should generally be transparent with donors and grantees, and my sense is the broader community has fairly little insight into the fund's current operations. I'll start with a brief history of what's happened since I joined the fund, and its impact, and move to a few reflections on ways the fund is working now.

(Also- you can donate to the Long-Term Future Fund here, and let us know here if you might be interested in becoming a fund manager. (The Long-Term Future Fund is part of EA Funds, which is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) (EV UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. (EV US). Donations to the Long-Term Future Fund are donations to EV US or EV UK.))

A brief history of my time on the Long-Term Future Fund

I joined the Long-Term Future Fund as a fund manager in June 2020. At the time, it was chaired by Matt Wage, had five fund managers (including me), and ran three rounds per year, with order ~50 applications per round, giving away an average of ~$450K per round in both 2019 and 2020, for a total of ~$1.35M per year.

Matt Wage left the fund, and I was appointed the new chair in February 2021. We also hired a number of new fund managers, and decided to try out a guest manager system where we had more temporary fund managers work with the fund. (We're still doing that today.)

The biggest change that I pushed for during my time as chair (which I believe was originally suggested by Ozzie Goeen, thanks Ozzie) was switching from three fixed rounds a year to a rolling application system, where anyone could apply to the fund at any time. My current guess is that this was a pretty big boost to the fund's impact, via giving us access to a bunch of counterfactual grant opportunities that other funders (who either didn't have rolling applications, or were funding a more constrained set of things) didn't have access to. I also pushed for a switch away from mandatory public reporting for our grant applicants (which I discuss somewhat below), which I also think gave us access to better grant opportunities, and which I also overall still endorse.

At a high-level, the fund consists of a number of fund managers who work a relatively low number of hours per week (generally 3 - 10, though I think it might be trending even lower recently). EA Funds itself only has one full-time employee - Caleb Parikh. There's been significant fund manager turnover since I joined the fund, generally because relevant fund managers have wanted to prioritize their other work - since I joined the fund, Matt Wage and Helen Toner have left, Adam Gleave, Evan Hubinger, and Becca Kagan have joined as permanent fund managers and then left, Linchuan Zhang has joined as a permanent fund manager, and we've had a number of guest managers join and leave the fund.

Also during my time on the fund, the volume of our grantmaking work has scaled significantly - whereas in 2020, we received 211 applications and funded 34 as grants, worth ~$1.3M dollars total, from March 2022 to March 2023, we received 878 applications and funded 263 as grants, worth ~$9.1M dollars total.

The fund's impact

My reflections below focus on ways I think the Long-Term Future Fund has been suboptimal over my time as chair, and I got feedback on my original draft of this post that this made it seem like my view of the fund was negative overall, which wasn't my intention. For clarity, my best guess is that overall, the Long-Term Future Fund has been, and continues to b...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Funds organisational update: Open Philanthropy matching and distancing, published by calebp on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

We want to communicate some changes that are happening at EA Funds, particularly on the EA Infrastructure Fund and the Long-Term Future Fund.

In summary:

EA Funds (particularly the EAIF and LTFF) and Open Philanthropy have historically had overlapping staff, and Open Phil has supported EA Funds, but we (staff at EA Funds and Open Philanthropy) are now trying to increase the separation between EA Funds and Open Philanthropy. In particular:

The current chairs of the LTFF and the EAIF, who have also joined as staff members at Open Philanthropy, are planning to step down from their respective chair positions over the next several months. Max Daniel is going to step down as the EAIF's chair on August 2nd, and Asya Bergal is planning to step down as the LTFF's chair in October.

To help transition EA Funds away from reliance on Open Philanthropy's financial support, Open Philanthropy is planning to match donations to the EA Infrastructure and Long-Term Future Fund at 2:1 rates, up to $3.5M each, over the next six months.

The EAIF and LTFF have substantial funding gaps - we are looking to raise an additional $3.84M for the LTFF and $4.83M for the EAIF. over the next six months. By default, I expect, the LTFF to have ~$720k, and the EAIF to have ~$400k by default.

Our relationship with Open Philanthropy

EA Funds started in 2017 and was largely developed during CEA's time at Y Combinator. It spun out of CEA in 2020, though both CEA and EA Funds are part of the Effective Ventures Foundation. Last year, EA Funds moved over $35M towards high-impact projects through the Animal Welfare Fund (AWF), EA Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF), and Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF).

Over the last two years, the EAIF and LTFF used some overlapping resources with Open Philanthropy in the following ways:

Over the last year, Open Philanthropy has contributed a substantial proportion of EAIF and LTFF budgets and has covered our entire operations budget.[1] They also made a sizable grant in February 2022. (You can see more detail on Open Philanthropy's website.)

The chairs of the EAIF and LTFF both joined the Longtermist EA Community Growth team at Open Philanthropy and have worked in positions at EA Funds and Open Philanthropy simultaneously. (Asya Bergal joined the LTFF in June 2020, has been chair since February 2021, and joined Open Philanthropy in April 2021; Max Daniel joined the EAIF in March 2021, has been chair since mid-2021, and joined Open Philanthropy in November 2022.)

As a board member of the Effective Ventures Foundation (UK), Claire Zabel, who is also the Senior Program Officer for EA Community Growth (Longtermism) at Open Philanthropy and supervises both Asya and Max, has regularly met with me throughout my tenure at EA Funds to hear updates on EA Funds and offer advice on various topics related to EA Funds (both day-to-day issues and higher-level organisation strategy).

That said, I think it is worth noting that:

The majority of funding for the LTFF has come from non-Open Philanthropy sources.

Open Philanthropy as an organisation has limited visibility into our activities, though certain Open Philanthropy employees, particularly Max Daniel and Asya Bergal, have a lot of visibility into certain parts of EA Funds.

Our grants supporting our operations and LTFF/EAIF grantmaking funds have had minimal restrictions.

Since the shutdown of the FTX Future Fund, Open Phil and I have both felt more excited about building a grantmaking organisation that is legibly independent from Open Phil. Earlier this year, Open Phil staff reached out to me proposing some steps to make this happen, and have worked with me closely ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Future technological progress does NOT correlate with methods that involve less suffering, published by Jim Buhler on August 2, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary: The alleged inevitable convergence between efficiency and methods that involve less suffering is one of the main arguments I've heard in favor of assuming the expected value of the future of humanity is positive, and I think it is invalid. While increased efficiency luckily converges with less biological suffering so far, this seems to be due to the physical limitations of humans and other animals rather than due to their suffering per se. And while past and present suffering beings all have severe physical limitations making them "inefficient", future forms of sentience will likely make this past trend completely irrelevant. Future forms of suffering might even be instrumentally very useful and therefore "efficient", such that we could make the reverse argument. Note that the goal of this post is not to argue that technological progress is bad, but simply to call out one specific claim that, despite its popularity, is - I think - just wrong.

The original argument

While I've been mostly facing this argument in informal conversation, it has been (I think pretty well) fleshed out by Ben West (2017): (emphasis is mine)

[W]e should expect there to only be suffering in the future if that suffering enables people to be lazier [(i.e., if it is instrumentally "efficient".] The most efficient solutions to problems don't seem like they involve suffering. [...] Therefore, as technology progresses, we will move more towards solutions which don't involve suffering[.]

Like most people I've heard use this argument, he illustrates his point with the following two examples:

Factory farming exists because the easiest way to get food which tastes good and meets various social goals people have causes cruelty. Once we get more scientifically advanced though, it will presumably become even more efficient to produce foods without any conscious experience at all by the animals (i.e. clean meat); at that point, the lazy solution is the more ethical one.

(This arguably is what happened with domestic work animals on farms: we now have cars and trucks which replaced horses and mules, making even the phrase "beat like a rented mule" seem appalling.)

Slavery exists because there is currently no way to get labor from people without them having conscious experience. Again though, this is due to a lack of scientific knowledge: there is no obvious reason why conscious experience is required for plowing a field or harvesting cocoa, and therefore the more efficient solution is to simply have nonconscious robots do these tasks.

(This arguably is what happened with human slavery in the US: industrialization meant that slavery wasn't required to create wealth in a large chunk of the US, and therefore slavery was outlawed.)

Why this argument is invalid

While I tentatively think the "the most efficient solutions to problems don't seem like they involve suffering" claim is true if we limit ourselves to the present and the past, I think it is false once we consider the long-term future, which makes the argument break apart.

Future solutions are more efficient insofar as they overcome past limitations. In the relevant examples that are enslaved humans and exploited animals, suffering itself is not a limiting factor. It is rather the physical limitations of those biological beings, relative to machines that could do a better job at their tasks.

I don't see any inevitable dependence between their suffering and these physical limitations. If human slaves and exploited animals were not sentient, this wouldn't change the fact that machines would do a better job.

The fact that suffering has been correlated with inefficiency so far seems to be ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My current LK99 questions, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on August 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

So this morning I thought to myself, "Okay, now I will actually try to study the LK99 question, instead of betting based on nontechnical priors and market sentiment reckoning." (My initial entry into the affray, having been driven by people online presenting as confidently YES when the prediction markets were not confidently YES.) And then I thought to myself, "This LK99 issue seems complicated enough that it'd be worth doing an actual Bayesian calculation on it"--a rare thought; I don't think I've done an actual explicit numerical Bayesian update in at least a year.

In the process of trying to set up an explicit calculation, I realized I felt very unsure about some critically important quantities, to the point where it no longer seemed worth trying to do the calculation with numbers. This is the System Working As Intended.

On July 30th, Danielle Fong said of this temperature-current-voltage graph,

'Normally as current increases, voltage drop across a material increases. in a superconductor, voltage stays nearly constant, 0. that appears to be what's happening here -- up to a critical current. with higher currents available at lower temperatures deeply in the "fraud or superconduct" territory, imo. like you don't get this by accident -- you either faked it, or really found something.'

The graph Fong is talking about only appears in the initial paper put forth by Young-Wan Kwon, allegedly without authorization. A different graph, though similar, appears in Fig. 6 on p. 12 of the 6-author LK-endorsed paper rushed out in response.

Is it currently widely held by expert opinion, that this diagram has no obvious or likely explanation except "superconductivity" or "fraud"? If the authors discovered something weird that wasn't a superconductor, or if they just hopefully measured over and over until they started getting some sort of measurement error, is there any known, any obvious way they could have gotten the same graph?

One person alleges an online rumor that poorly connected electrical leads can produce the same graph. Is that a conventional view?

Alternatively: If this material is a superconductor, have we seen what we expected to see? Is the diminishing current capacity with increased temperature usual? How does this alleged direct measurement of superconductivity square up with the current-story-as-I-understood-it that the material is only being very poorly synthesized, probably only in granules or gaps, and hence only detectable by looking for magnetic resistance / pinning?

This is my number-one question. Call it question 1-NO, because it's the question of "How does the NO story explain this graph, and how prior-improbable or prior-likely was that story?", with respect to my number one question.

Though I'd also like to know the 1-YES details: whether this looks like a high-prior-probability superconductivity graph; or a graph that requires a new kind of superconductivity, but one that's theoretically straightforward given a central story; or if it looks like unspecified weird superconductivity, with there being no known theory that predicts a graph looking roughly like this.

What's up with all the partial levitation videos? Possibilities I'm currently tracking:

2-NO-A: There's something called "diamagnetism" which exists in other materials. The videos by LK and attempted replicators show the putative superconductor being repelled from the magnet, but not being locked in space relative to the magnet. Superconductors are supposed to exhibit Meissner pinning, and the failure of the material to be pinned to the magnet indicates that this isn't a superconductor. (Sabine Hossenfelder seems to talk this way here. "I lost hope when I saw this video; this doesn't look like the Meissner ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning, published by Zvi on August 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

SPOILER WARNING: This post, after a brief spoiler-free review section, will contain full spoilers for Oppenheimer, Barbie and Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, and some for Across the Spiderverse.

Movies are so back. While they are having their Barbieheimer moment, it seems worthwhile to gather thoughts of myself and others on both movies, and also mention two other recent pictures.

First, I'll offer various levels of spoiler-free review of all four movies, then get into the weeds.

Spoiler-Free Reviews

Full Spoiler-Free (1-bit reviews, only yes or no):

See all four movies.

Almost Fully Spoiler-Free (several-bit reviews):

You should definitely see Spiderverse, Barbie and Oppenheimer. Mission Impossible is good, but optional.

Pro tip, as it turns out: Do not see Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day.

Ranked by how pure quality: Across the Spiderverse, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

Ranked by how good a time you'll have: Across the Spiderverse, Barbie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Oppenheimer.

Ranked by how important it is to have seen it, and how important it is to ensure everyone sees it: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Across the Spiderverse, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

Traditional-Level Spoiler-Free Review: Oppenheimer

See it. And remember: It isn't for you.

By this I mean several things.

If you are reading this, there are things you doubtless already know and messages you do not need to hear, that many others do not know and do need to hear.

Yes, this results in the movie being three hours long and it should have found ways to be shorter, although it is not so easy to make it too much shorter.

One does not go to a movie like this to enjoy it. Appreciate, reflect, experience, take in, learn, understand, cry, remember, yes. Enjoy, no. If you enjoyed this movie, what were you even watching?

Thus, you see this movie for other people. You see it so that you will act in the world as a person who has seen it, and can take that with them as they live.

Also so that you can share this moment with other people, and relate to them and help them take it with them into the world, as well.

This is the central message you are meant to understand and take away from this film, once you know its context: It isn't for you. None of it is for you.

If you are looking for the 'I love science' or 'how to science' movie, this is not it.

If that makes you want to not see this movie, you shouldn't see this movie.

Oppenheimer has an 88 on Metacritic. By that metric, it is overrated. I'd have it around 80.

Traditional-Level Spoiler-Free Review: Barbie

See it. You may think it is not for you, and you are wrong. This is for everyone.

I speculated that this might be the highest VORP (Value Over Replacement Picture) movie of all time. There are better movies, and Barbie is not perfect, but it is so much better than it had any right to be or anyone had a right to expect. It is fiercely loyal to its source material, it is highly intelligent, dense and full of real ideas playing on multiple levels, it almost entirely avoids the traps one would expect it to fall into and that some claim it did fall into. Unlike many movies these days it is tight, with no dull or unnecessary moments. The soundtrack kills. And it is freaking hilarious throughout.

Barbie has an 80 on Metacritic. It is underrated and should be more like a 90.

Traditional-Level Spoiler-Free Review: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning

There may never be a more fitting title than Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Each of these four words is doing important work. And it is very much a Part 1.

There are two clear cases against seeing this movie.

This is a two hour and forty five minute series of action set pieces...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: ARC Evals new report: Evaluating Language-Model Agents on Realistic Autonomous Tasks, published by Beth Barnes on August 1, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Blogpost version

Paper

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