Thanks for this! I just doubled my donation because of this answer and @kave's.

FWIW a lot of my understanding that Lighthaven was a burden comes from this section:

I initially read this as $3m for three interest payments. (Maybe change the wording so 2 and 3 don't both mention the interest payment?)

I donated $500. I get a lot of value from the website and think it's important for both the rationalist and AI safety communities. Two related things prevented me from donating more:

1. Though it's the website which I find important, as I understand it, the majority of this money will go towards supporting Lighthaven.
   1. I could easily imagine, if I were currently in Berkeley, finding Lighthaven more important. My guess is that in general folks in Berkeley / the Bay Area will tend to value Lighthaven more highly than folks elsewhere. Whether this is because of Berkeley folks overvaluing it or the rest of us undervaluing, I'm not sure. Probably a bit of both.
   2. To me, this suggests unbundling the two rather different activities.
2. Sustainability going forward. It's not clear to me that Lightcone is financially sustainable, in fact the numbers in this post make it look like it's not (due to the loss of funders), barring some very large donations. I worry that the future of LW will be endangered by the financial burden of Lighthaven.
   1. ETA: On reflection, I think some large donors will probably step in to prevent bankruptcy, though (a) I think there's a good chance Lightcone will then be stuck in perpetual fundraising mode, and (b) that belief of course calls into question the value of smaller donations like mine.

though with an occasional Chinese character once in a while

The Chinese characters sound potentially worrying. Do they make sense in context? I tried a few questions but didn't see any myself.

There are now two alleged instances of full chains of thought leaking (use an appropriate amount of spepticism), both of which seem coherent enough.

I think it's more likely that this is just a (non-model) bug in ChatGPT. In the examples you gave, it looks like there's always one step that comes completely out of nowhere and the rest of the chain of though would make sense without it. This reminds me of the bug where ChatGPT would show other users' conversations.

I hesitate to draw any conclusions from the o1 CoT summary since it's passed through a summarizing model.

after weighing multiple factors including user experience, competitive advantage, and the option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring, we have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users. We acknowledge this decision has disadvantages. We strive to partially make up for it by teaching the model to reproduce any useful ideas from the chain of thought in the answer. For the o1 model series we show a model-generated summary of the chain of thought.

o1-preview and o1-mini are available today (ramping over some number of hours) in ChatGPT for plus and team users and our API for tier 5 users.

https://x.com/sama/status/1834283103038439566

Construction Physics has a very different take on the economics of the Giga-press.

Tesla was the first car manufacturer to adopt large castings, but the savings were so significant — an estimated 20 to 40% reduction in the cost of a car body — that they’re being adopted by many other car manufacturers, particularly Chinese ones. Large, complex castings have been described as a key tool for not only reducing cost but also good EV charging performance.

I think Construction Physics is usually pretty good. In this case my guess is that @bhauth has looked into this more deeply so I trust this post a bit more.

I wonder how much my reply to Adam Shai addresses your concerns?

Very helpful, thank you.

In physics, the objects of study are mass, velocity, energy, etc. It’s natural to quantify them, and as soon as you’ve done that you’ve taken the first step in applying math to physics. There are a couple reasons that this is a productive thing to do:

1. You already derive benefit from a very simple starting point.
2. There are strong feedback loops. You can make experimental predictions, test them, and refine your theories.

Together this means that you benefit from even very simple math and can scale up smoothly to more sophisticated. From simply adding masses to F=ma to Lagrangian mechanics and beyond.

It’s not clear to me that those virtues apply here:

• I don’t see the easy starting point, the equivalent of adding two masses.
  • It’s not obvious that the objects of study are quantifiable. It’s not even clear what the objects of study are.
  • Formal statements about religion must be unfathomably complex?
• I don’t see feedback loops. It must be hard to run experiments, make predictions, etc.

Perhaps these concerns would be addressed by examples of the kind of statement you have in mind.