Have you guys already done a voting survey (with whatever system seems good – STAR voting?) sent out to (1) the population of talent you want to take with you for AI research, (2) rationalists who aren’t mission critical but are still valuable as interstitial social elements?
If not – at some point that’s going to happen, right? This discussion seems most useful if it exists to inform a large number of people who might move what the options are, so that their preferences can be assessed numerically.
Agree that the treatment of nihilism is shallow, but it didn’t matter to me because it wasn’t the heart of the movie at all. The heart is, hmm, being a failure? Letting your relationships decay because you’re neglecting them, because you don’t have a “show up for my people” attitude about them (maybe because on some level you expect both yourself and them to be better, but you aren’t, and this is discouraging)… letting (career, family, time management) problems build up that you dismiss as chronic irritations rather than the defining, central challenges that you have to tackle… and then managing, somehow, to change, to choose love, to choose commitment to your own life.
(stares at that paragraph) Okay, yes. That’s it for me. This movie is good because it shows a wreck of a person choosing to commit to their own life. I don’t commit enough to my own life, my friends don’t commit to their own lives, and it’s very potent to watch someone turn around on this! It turns me a bit in the same direction.
I cannot ask for more from art.
Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.