Best I can tell, the risk of psychosis is much higher with Goenka style retreats, although I don't have hard numbers, only anecdotal evidence and theory that suggests it should be more common.

My experience has been that anything except long intensive retreats don't move my mind out of its default attractor state, and that I probably waited too long to attend do long retreats, and all the advice goes in the opposite direction.

I mention this because all the talk of the downside of meditation have me thinking of a tweet that goes roughly like "why do both republicans and democrats pretend HRT does anything". Goenka retreats have medium-strength effects on me, an intensive one-month retreat at home had a decent effect. I may be doing something wrong.

Yup, that's correct if I remember the sources correctly. I guess the tone surrounding it doesn't match that particular bit of content. I should also turn the pledged/received numbers into a table for easier reading.

Yup, it's a regionalism that I mis-/over-generalized. I'll avoid it from now on.

It is, and it's the thing I'd most like Smil to read if I could recommend something to him.

I'll have to go and fix that on Wikipedia as well, that's what misled me in the first place. Thanks again for checking this! The best paper I'm finding is this one with six scenarios, them putting the cost between -$17 trio. and -$35 trio., so I wasn't off by a factor of ten but instead a factor of two to five.

Yep, I intended that to mean "trillion".

Aw man I shouldn't have trusted that number! It seemed a bit sketchy. I'll edit it into something sane.

Edit: Fixed.

Vaclav Smil is great on this, I really liked his book Growth. He takes a very numerate but still very different view on history (e.g., ah, fitting a sigmoid to GDP numbers in the book).

@Eric Drexler you were mentioned in the parent comment.

Sonnet 4.5 writes its private notes in slop before outputting crisp text. I think humans are largely like this as well?

This is missing that after the third paragraph the scratchpad content shown to the user starts getting summarised by a smaller model${}_{98\%}$ to prevent people from distealing Claude's chain of thought. You can see a clear phase transition where the scratchpad turns from crisp detailed content into slop. That's where the summarization starts.