Luke Muehlhauser

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]:

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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 I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q2 2024

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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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Media diet for Q4 2022

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q3 2022

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Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q2 2022

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Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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  1. I really enjoy this, but did we really need another Richter “recomposition” of this exact piece before Richter has provided the same treatment to other beloved works? Could he next recompose Beethoven’s 9th or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or something else? [↩]

Effective altruism as I see it

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Here’s the main way I think about effective altruism, personally:

  1. I was born into incredible privilege. I can satisfy all of my needs, and many of my wants, and still have plenty of money, time, and energy left over. So what will I do with those extra resources?
  2. I might as well use them to help others, because I wish everyone was as well-off as I am. Plus, figuring out how to help others effectively sounds intellectually interesting.
  3. With whatever portion of my resources I’m devoting to helping others, I want my help to be truly other-focused. In other words, I want to benefit others by their own lights, as much as possible (with whatever portion of resources I’ve devoted to helping others). This is very different from other approaches to helping others, such as helping in a way that makes me feel good (e.g. a cause I have a personal connection to, or “giving back” to a community that has benefited me), or helping specific kinds of people that I feel special empathy for (e.g. identifiable victims, people with whom I share particular characteristics, or people who face particular deprivations that are salient to me), or helping in a way that allows me to achieve particular virtues, or helping in ways that aren’t scope-sensitive (e.g. spending $1 million to save one life via bone marrow transplant rather than spending the same amount to save ~220 lives via malaria prevention).1 I might do those other things too, but I wouldn’t count them as coming from my budget for other-focused altruism. (See also: Harsanyi’s veil of ignorance and aggregation theorem.)
  4. Okay, so what can I do that will benefit others by their own lights, as much as possible (with the other-focused portion of my resources)? Here is where things get complicated, drawing from domains as diverse as ethics, welfare economics, consciousness studies, global health, macrohistory, AI, innovation economics, exploratory engineering, and so much more. There will be many legitimate debates, and I’ll never be certain that I’ve come to the right conclusions about how to help others as much as possible, but the goal of all this research will remain the same: to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible and then devote my other-focused resources toward doing that.

In other words, I’m pretty happy with the most canonical definition of effective altruism I know of, from MacAskill (2019), which defines effective altruism as:

(i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and

(ii) the use of the findings from (i) to try to improve the world.

This notion of effective altruism doesn’t demand that you use all your resources to help others. It doesn’t even say that you should use your other-focused budget of resources to help others as much as possible.2 Instead, it merely describes an intellectual project (clause i) and a practical project (clause ii) that some people are excited about but most people aren’t.3

Effective altruism is radically different from many other suggestions for what it looks like to do good or help others.4 True, the portion of resources devoted to helping others may not differ hugely (though it may differ some5 ) between an effective altruist and a non-EA Christian or humanist or social justice activist, since the canonical notion of effective altruism doesn’t take a stance on what that portion should be.6 Instead, effective altruism differs from other approaches to helping others via one or more of its defining characteristics, namely its aspiration to be maximizing, impartial, welfarist, and evidence-based.7

For example, I think it’s difficult for an effective altruist to conclude that the following popular ideas for how to do good or help others are plausible contenders for helping others as much as possible (in an impartial, welfarist, evidence-based way):

  1. Providing basic necessities (food, shelter, health care, education) to people who are poor by wealthy-country standards, at a cost that’s ≥100x the cost per person of providing those necessities to people who are poor by global standards. (Not maximizing, not impartial.)
  2. Funding for the arts. (Not maximizing: there is already more great art than anyone can enjoy in a lifetime, and the provision of marginal artistic experience benefits others much less than e.g. providing the poorest people in the world with basic necessities.)
  3. Religious evangelism, e.g. to spare souls from hell. (Not evidence-based.)
  4. Funding advocacy against GMOs or nuclear power. (Not evidence-based.)
  5. Funding animal shelters rather than efforts against factory farming, which tortures and slaughters billions of animals annually.8 (Not maximizing.)
  6. (Many, many other examples.)

Of course, even assuming effective altruism’s relatively distinctive joint commitment to maximization, impartialism, welfarism, and evidence, there will still be a wide range of reasonable debates about which interventions help others as much as possible (in an impartial, welfarist, evidence-based way), just as there will always be a wide range of reasonable debates about any number of scientific questions (and that’s no objection to scientific epistemology).9

Moreover, these points don’t just follow from the canonical definition of effective altruism; they are also observed in the practice of people who call themselves “effective altruists.” For example, EAs are somewhat distinctive in how they debate the question of how best to help others (the debates are generally premised on maximization, welfarism, impartialism, and careful interpretation of whatever evidence is available), and they are very distinctive with regard to which causes they end up devoting the most money and labor to. For example, according to this estimate, the top four EA causes in 2019 by funding allocated were:10

  1. Global health ($185 million)
  2. Farm animal welfare ($55 million)
  3. (Existential) biosecurity ($41 million)11 — note this was before COVID-19, when biosecurity was a much less popular cause
  4. Potential (existential) risks from AI ($40 million)

Global health is a fairly popular cause among non-EAs, but farm animal welfare, (existential) biosecurity, and potential (existential) risks from AI are very idiosyncratic. Indeed, I suspect that EAs are responsible for ≥40% of all funding for each of farm animal welfare, potential existential risks from AI, and existential biosecurity.12

  1. My estimate of the cost of a bone marrow transplant is taken from Millman (2020). My estimate for the cost of saving lives via malaria prevention is $4,500, which is GiveWell’s estimate for the average cost-effectiveness of GiveWell-directed funding to Malaria Consortium in 2020, taken from this page on June 4th 2022. I might be misunderstanding the cost estimate in Millman (2020), though in any case I suspect that basic point will stand, that paying for bone marrow transplants will save much fewer lives per dollar than funding malaria prevention via donations to Malaria Consortium. [↩]
  2. See MacAskill (2019), section 2. [↩]
  3. You could call this a “watered down” or “weak” version of moral realist utilitarianism, but it is not a watered down or weak version of effective altruism (as suggested by Nielsen). It is the primary, canonical notion of effective altruism, crafted with input from a survey of effective altruism “thought leaders” from a few years ago. [↩]
  4. Contra Srinivasan and Nielsen. [↩]
  5. It’s hard to get comparable numbers on this (or any numbers at all), but my anecdotal sense is that highly engaged EAs are substantially more likely to choose a “direct work” EA career than similarly engaged members of most other morally-motivated communities are, though of course it’s not at all rare in other morally-motivated communities. EAs might also on average donate a bit more than most other morally-motivated communities, though it’s worth noting that e.g. the median EA (in this survey) donates much less than 10% of their income. If anyone has numbers for any of these claims, let me know!

    Some EAs embrace a more morally demanding version of EA, even though strong moral demandingness is not part of the canonical definition of EA. I applaud and respect these EAs and think they are morally superior to me, but my sense is that they are in the minority of EAs, and of course many other morally-motivated communities also have a minority of practitioners who embrace an especially morally demanding lifestyle. [↩]

  6. See again MacAskill (2019), section 2. [↩]
  7. MacAskill (2019) uses the phrase “science-aligned” rather than “evidence-based,” and notes that effective altruism’s impartialism and welfarism is “tentative.” [↩]
  8. For context, Lewis Bollard estimates that “US animal rescue shelters had a combined budget of $3.2B in 2021. Shelters house 6.3M animals/year, so that’s ~$500 spent per shelter animal (often for a short period of time). US farm animal advocacy orgs had a combined budget of ~$100M, while the US has 2.7B farm animals alive at any time, so that’s $0.04 spent per farm animal.” [↩]
  9. Indeed, after making a small number of moral assumptions, questions about which interventions will help others the most just are, in a broad sense, scientific questions. [↩]
  10. See the same post for estimates of how much EA labor goes to different causes; that picture is harder to describe succinctly so I’ve skipped it here. [↩]
  11. By “existential biosecurity” I just mean “Biosecurity and pandemic preparedness interventions focused on avoiding existential catastrophe from pathogens,” which is generally the sort of biosecurity work that EAs fund. [↩]
  12. This is harder to determine for the case of existential biosecurity, since existential biosecurity interventions overlap a lot with lower-stakes biosecurity interventions, and biosecurity in general has become a more popular cause since COVID-19. On farm animal welfare, Lewis Bollard estimates that EA funders were responsible for perhaps ~45% for farm animal advocacy work in 2021, though Leah Edgerton’s estimate of 25% for 2018 may have been correct (EA funding in this area has increased in recent years). [↩]

Media diet for Q1 2022

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Music

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q4 2021

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Music

Spotify playlist for this quarter is here. Playlists for past quarters and years here.

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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Media diet for Q3 2021

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Music

Spotify playlist for this quarter is here. Playlists for past quarters and years here.

Music I most enjoyed discovering this quarter:

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