From the 2019 announcement:

Returns for our first round of investors are capped at 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in front of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds as we make further progress.

I remember OpenAI or Sam Altman saying that in subsequent funding rounds, the profit cap would decrease, eventually reaching 2x. But I can't find a source for this right now. (Even if I am remembering correctly, who knows if OpenAI ever actually lowered the cap below 100x.)

Now that I'm thinking about it more, the 100x profit cap was always too low. If OpenAI's valuation in 2019 was $3 billion or less, then now, with a valuation of $300 billion, those first-round investors would already hit the cap on their returns. 

It seems like OpenAI was already trying to rectify this problem before its recent announcement. In 2023, The Economist reported that: 

Profits for investors in this venture were capped at 100 times their investment (though thanks to a rule change this cap will rise by 20% a year starting in 2025). Any profits above the cap flow to the parent non-profit.

If the purpose of the profit cap (or return on investment cap) is to limit OpenAI investors from having an obscene level of ownership over the wealth generated by AGI, this this makes a lot more sense. (I'm assuming that the profit cap is abandoned now and this is a moot point, but I find it interesting to think about anyway.)

If OpenAI had stuck to the plan of increasing the 100x profit cap by 20% year every year starting in 2025, here's what the profit cap would be in future years.^[1]

2030: 250x

2035: 620x

2040: 1,540x

2045: 3,830x

2050: 9,540x

2055: 23,740x

2060: 59,070x

2065: 146,980x

2070: 365,730x

As time goes on, eventually the number gets too big, but even 365,730x is not a totally unprecedented return on investment in the pre-AGI world. Mike Markkula's angel investment in Apple would have had a return on investment (ROI) of over 3,000,000x had he retained his shares from the beginning until the 2020s.

If you look up lists of the stocks that have grown the most from IPO to their all-time high, or the venture capital investments that have had the best ROI, you see some numbers in the 1,000x to 10,000x range. So, a 10,000x cap would not be unreasonable. 

If you think the amount of wealth generated by AGI will be essentially unlimited and defy calculation by conventional standards, then it shouldn't be a problem to have a cap of 10,000x or even 100,000x or 1,000,000x, since that would still end up being a small percentage of the overall amount of wealth generated by AGI.

 

If you zoom out and think of effective altruism as a movement in favour of charity effectiveness and rigorous evaluations of charity, and in favour of giving more to charity than people typically give, then whether these ideas persist and grow is a different question than whether the term "effective altruism" or organizations like the Centre for Effective Altruism fall into decline. 

The Gates Foundation, for example, precedes the term "effective altruism" and embodies some of the same ideas and a similar intellectual spirit as effective altruism. 

GiveWell, somewhat surprisingly, for whatever reason, isn't really associated (as least, it doesn't seem to me like it is) with the effective altruist "brand". Maybe I'm wrong, but I could see GiveWell continuing to operate and maintain a decent amount of popularity long after a hypothetical decline and fall of things explicitly called "effective altruism".

There is a version of effective altruism we could maybe call "EA exceptionalism" or "messianic effective altruism", which has existed for a long time (at least 10 years) and has never made sense. This is the view that effective altruism is somehow unlike or apart from all other efforts to help the world, that it is has a unique power to see the truth and solve the world's problems, and that in some sense the world's fate depends on effective altruism. That's a crazy view and if it dies, good riddance.

We also have to ask ourselves if the effective altruism movement (the movement explicitly calling itself "effective altruism") ever fully made sense or ever had a fully coherent version of what it was or what it was for. There's a weird mix of things in EA — charity effectiveness in the global poverty cause area, veganism, AGI doomsday prophecy, bizarre influences from the "rationalist community", academic moral philosophy, and weird, miscellaneous stuff that defies simple categorization, partly because some of it is undefined and unformed. (What on Earth is "truthseeking", for example? If "longtermism" is actually a novel idea, what does it actually tell us we should do differently?) 

Maybe that's a mix of things that don't need to be together that should come apart again. Maybe this specific convergence of ideas and people and culture existed for a reason or a season, and that time has passed, and that's okay.

My advice is to adopt a beginner's mind and go back to basics. Does effective altruism, as a movement, still have a reason for existing? If so, what is that reason? If it's a good enough reason to motivate you, personally, focus on that. Put your efforts into that. 

Investing in long-term interventions in global health and global poverty that are expected to pay off over decades is incompatible with the idea that AGI will be created within 10 years and will have transformative effects on the world, greater than the effects of the Industrial Revolution, akin to a century's worth of economic growth and a century's worth of progress in STEM (and adjacent fields) in the subsequent 10 years, and only picking up steam from there. So, the two most important ideas in EA are actually at odds with each other. That doesn't make sense. Why are they sharing a movement?

I don't see what good it does to try to keep these incompatible ideas bound together in the same movement. That might be a deeper reason for EA to struggle going forward than anything to do with FTX. 

Do those other meditation centres make similarly extreme claims about the benefits of their programs? If so, I would be skeptical of them for the same reasons. If not, then the comparison is inapt. 

If I had developed a meditation program that I really thought did what Jhourney is claiming their meditation program does, I would not be approaching it this way. I would try to make the knowledge as widely accessible as I could as quickly as possible. Jhourney has been doing retreats for over two years. What's the hold up?

Transcendental Meditation (TM)'s stated justification for their secrecy and high prices is that TM requires careful, in-person, one-on-one instruction. What's Jhourney's justification for not making instructional videos or audio recordings that anyone can buy for, say, $70?

Could it be just commercial self-interest? But, in that case, why hasn't the jhana meditation encouraged them to prize altruism more? Isn't that supposed to be one of the effects?

I'm willing to make some allowance for personal self-interest and for the self-interest of the business, of course. But selling $70 instructional materials to millions of people would be a good business. And the Nobel Peace Prize comes with both a $1 million cash prize and a lot of fame and acclaim. Similarly, the Templeton Prize comes with $1.4 million in cash and some prestige. There are other ways to capitalize on fame and esteem, such as through speaking engagements. So, sharing a radical breakthrough in jhana meditation with the world has strong business incentives and strong personal self-interest incentives. Why not do it?

The simplest explanation is that they don't actually have the "product" they're claiming to have. Or, to put it another way, the "product" they have is not as differentiated from other meditation programs as they're claiming and does not reliably produce the benefits they're claiming it reliably produces.

On the topic of shame and guilt, I really want to recommend what the emotions researcher Brené Brown says about the topic. The best, quickest way to understand what she has to say about shame and guilt is to watch her two TED Talks in release order. 

The first talk, on vulnerability, only lightly touches on shame, but it provides context for the second talk, without which the second talk will make less sense.

The second talk, on shame, explicitly gets into shame and guilt, the differences between them, and the difference between their effects on behaviour.

Here's the core distinction, which she gives in the second talk:

The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." ... There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. 

And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders.

And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.

I think there's probably such a thing as maladaptive guilt too. I vaguely remember Brené Brown briefly talking about this somewhere. If you feel guilt about something that's not your fault and you can't control, or if your guilt is way out of proportion to what you did wrong, then maybe those could be cases where guilt is maladaptive. 

But most of the time people are saying "guilt" when what they're talking about it shame — a focus on self. So, most of the problems people have with "guilt" can actually be attributed to shame. 

Further resources beyond the TED Talks:

-Brené Brown's book I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't), about shame and shame resilience

-Brené Brown's audio program The Power of Vulnerability (you can find it on Audible), in which shame and shame resilience are a major topic 

-A more textbook-style book that Brené Brown recommends (and which I've only read a bit of but which seems good), Shame and Guilt by June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, if you are interested in a more quantitative or more academic dive into the research

$1,295 is quite a steep price. Even with the $200 referral code discount, $1,095 is still a steep price.

What is the interactive or personalized aspect of the online "retreats"? Why couldn’t they be delivered as video on-demand (like a YouTube playlist), audio on-demand (like a podcast), or an app like Headspace or 10% Happier?

From some poking around, I found that Jhourney has been doing retreats for at least 2 years, and possibly longer. It’s hard to believe that the following could be true:

-That around 40% of participants have a transformative experience (about 66% of participants say they experienced a jhana and about 60% of that 66% say it was the best thing to happen to them in at least the past six months).

-That the people who have a transformative experience also have some sort of lasting, sustainable improvement to their lives long-term.

-That Jhourney’s way of teaching meditation is so much different from and better than other ways of teaching meditation that have been broadly accessible for years — such as apps like Headspace or any number of meditation teachers or retreats that exist seemingly in (or near) every major city in North America — that it produces transformative experiences and sustained life improvement at a much higher rate.

This might be more believable if Jhourney had just developed this program and tried it out for the first time. But, as I said, they have been doing retreats for at least 2 years. It seems dubious the results could be this good without making more of a splash.

It also stokes the fires of my skepticism that this allegedly transformative knowledge is kept behind a $1,295 paywall. If Jhourney’s house blend of jhana meditation makes you more altruistic, why wouldn’t the people who work at Jhourney try to share it widely with the world? That’s what I would do if I had developed a meditation program that I thought was really producing these sorts of results.

Maybe I would still need to charge something for it rather than make it completely free. A 1-year Headspace subscription costs $70. Maybe something in that ballpark.

Jhourney reminds me of Transcendental Meditation (TM), which charges $1,400 for meditation instruction that — from what I hear — is not very differentiated from what you can get for free or cheap. TM also makes extreme claims about the kinds of results it produces for people.

My impression of TM is that it’s basically a scam. They are secretive, charge an inordinate amount of money, don’t seem to produce better results than what you can get from Headspace or your typical local meditation teacher, and make claims about the benefits of the practice that far exceed the actual benefits.

I’m inclined to believe that Jhourney is similar. People do have transformative experiences — with meditation, with spiritual retreats, with pilgrimages like the Camino de Santiago (or secular walks like the Pacific Coast Trail), with religion, with psychedelics, with therapy, with all sorts of things — but that’s different from what Jhourney seems to be claiming. Again, what I’m specifically skeptical of is:

-That a high percentage of people (e.g. 40%) will have a transformative experience.

-That this transformative experience or impression of having a transformative experience will lead to positive long-term life changes.

-That the percentage of people who experience something transformative, the magnitude of the transformative experience, or the long-term effects marks a radical departure from the experiences people have been having for decades in North America with meditation, psychedelics, and therapy.

In addition to meditation and the other normal things, I have tried all kinds of weird things like nootropics, hypnosis/hypnotherapy, and binaural beats. I am open to trying weird things. Another way to put it is that I’m sort of an "easy mark" for self-help fads.

So, when I read this post I was tempted to believe that Jhourney had invented a non-pharmacological version of the Limitless pill. But, for the reasons I just gave, Jhourney’s narrative doesn’t add up for me.

When they release the $70 app, maybe I’ll try it then.

There are a few people who support both effective altruism and radical leftist politics who have written about how these two schools of thought might be integrated. Bob Jacobs, the former organizer of EA Ghent in Belgium, is one. You might be interested in his blog Collective Altruism: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/ 

Another writer you may be interested in is the academic philosopher David Thorstad. I don't know what his political views are. But his blog Reflective Altruism, which is about effective altruism, has covered a few topics relevant to this post, such as billionaire philanthropy, racism, sexism, and sexual harassment in the effective altruist movement: https://reflectivealtruism.com/post-series/

There is also a pseudonymous EA Forum user called titotal whose politics seem leftist or left-leaning. They have written some criticisms of certain aspects of the EA movement both here on the forum and on their blog: https://titotal.substack.com/

I don't know if any of the people I just mentioned wholeheartedly support radical feminism, though. Even among feminists and progressives or leftists, the reputation of radical feminism has been seriously damaged through a series of serious mistakes, including:

• Support for the oppression of and systemic violence and discrimination against trans people^[1]
• Support for banning pornography^[2]
• Opposition to legalizing or decriminalizing sex work^[3]
• Arguing that most sex is unethical^[4]

I'm vaguely aware that probably some radical feminists today take different stances on these topics, and probably there have historically been some radical feminists who have disagreed with these bad opinions, but the movement is tarnished from these mistakes and it will be difficult to recover. 

In my experience, people who have radical leftist economic views are generally hostile to the idea of people in high-income countries donating to charities that provide medicine or anti-malarial bednets or cash to poor people in low-income countries. It's hard for me to imagine much cooperation or overlap between effective altruism and the radical left. 

Effective altruism was founded as a movement focused on the effectiveness of charities that work on global poverty and global health. A lot of radical leftists — I'd guess the majority — fundamentally reject this idea. So, how many radical leftists are realistically going to end up supporting effective altruism? (I'm talking about radical leftists here because most radical feminists and specifically some of the ones you mentioned also have radical leftist economic and political views.)

Finally, although there are many important ideas in radical feminist thought that I think anyone — including effective altruists — could draw from, there is also a large amount of low-quality scholarship and bad ideas to sift through. I already mentioned some of the bad ideas. One example of low-quality scholarship, in my opinion, is adrienne maree brown's book Pleasure Activism. I tried to read this book because it was recommended to me by a friend. 

To give just one example of what I found to be low-quality scholarship, adrienne maree brown believes in vampires, believes she has been bitten by a vampire, and has asked for vampires to turn her into a vampire. 

To give another example, the book is called Pleasure Activism, but it does not give a clear definition or explanation of what the term "pleasure activism" is supposed to mean. If you make a concept the title of your book, and you write a book that is nominally about that concept, then if I read your book, I should be able to understand that concept. Instead, the attempt to define the concept is too brief and too vague. This is the full extent of the definition from the book:

Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.

Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.

Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good. This includes sex and the erotic, drugs, fashion, humor, passion work, connection, reading, cooking and/or eating, music and other arts, and so much more.

Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.

Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life — and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching.

Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change.

Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.

What is pleasure activism? After reading this, I don't know. I'm not sure if adrienne marie brown knows, either.

To be clear, I'm a feminist, I'm LGBT, I believe in social justice, and I've voted for a social democratic political party multiple times. I took courses on feminist theory and queer studies when I was university and I think a lot of the scholarship in those fields is amazingly good.

But a lot of the radical left, to borrow a bon mot from Noam Chomsky, want to "live in some abstract seminar somewhere". They have no ideas about how to actually make the world better in specific, actionable ways,^[5] or they have hazy ideas they can't clearly define or explain (like pleasure activism), or they have completely disastrous ideas that would lead to nightmares in real life (such as economic degrowth or authoritarian communism). 

This is fine if you want to live in some abstract seminar somewhere, if you want to enjoy an aesthetic of radical change while changing nothing — and if we can rely on no governments ever trying to implement the disastrous ideas like degrowth or authoritarian communism that would kill millions of people — but what if you want to help rural families in sub-Saharan Africa not get malaria or afford a new roof for their home or get vaccines or vitamins for the children? Then you've got to put away the inscrutable theory and live in the real world (which does not have vampires in it). 

EA should avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?

My strongest reason for disliking AI-generated images is that so often they look tacky, as you aptly said, or even disgustingly bad. 

One of the worst parts of AI-generated art is that sometimes it looks good at a glance and then as you look at it longer, you notice some horribly wrong detail. Human art (if it's good quality) lets you enjoy the small details. It can be a pleasure to discover them. AI-generated art ruins this by punishing you for paying close attention. 

But that's a matter of taste.

What I'm voting "disagree" on is that the EA Forum should have a rule or a strong social norm against using AI-generated images. I don't think people should use ugly images, whether they're AI-generated or free stock photos. But leave it up to people decide on a case-by-case basis which images are ugly and don't make it a rule about categorically banning AI-generated images.

I am trying to be open-minded to the ethical arguments against AI-generated art. I find the discourse frustratingly polarized. 

For example, a lot of people are angry about the supposed environmental impact of AI-generated art, but what is the evidence of this? Anytime I've tried to look up hard numbers on how much energy AI uses, a) it's been hard to find clear, reliable information and b) the estimates I've found tend to be pretty small. 

Similarly, is there evidence that AI-generated images are displacing the labour of human artists? Again, this is something I've tried to look into, but the answer isn't easy to find. There are anecdotes here and there, but it's hard to tell if there is a broader trend that is significantly affecting a large number of artists.

It's difficult to think about the topic of whether artists should need to give permission for their images to be used for AI training or should be compensated if they are. There is no precedent in copyright law to cover this because this technology is unprecedented. For the same reason, there is no precedent in societal norms. We have to decide on a new way of thinking about a new situation, without traditions to rely on. 

So, if the three main ethical arguments against AI-generated art are:

-It harms the environment
-It takes income away from human artists
-AI companies should be required to get permission from artists before training AI models on their work and/or financially compensate them if they do

All three of these arguments feel really unsubstantiated to me. My impression right now is:

-Probably not
-Maybe? What's the evidence?
-Maybe? I don't know. What's the reasoning?

The main aesthetic argument against AI-generated art is of course:

-It's ugly

And I mostly agree. But those ChatGPT images in the Studio Ghibli style are absolutely beautiful. There is a 0% chance I will ever pay an artist to draw a Studio Ghibli-style picture of my cat. But I can use a computer to turn my cat into a funny, cute little drawing. And that's wonderful.

I'm a politically progressive person. I'm LGBT, I'm a feminist, I believe in social justice, I've voted for a social democratic political party multiple times, and I've been in community and in relationship with leftists a lot. I am so sick of online leftist political discourse. 

I am not interested in thinking and talking about celebrities all the time. (So much online leftist discourse is about celebrities.)

I don't want to spend that much time and energy constantly re-evaluating which companies I boycott and whether there's a marginally more ethical alternative.

I don't want every discussion about every topic to be polarized, shut down, moralized, and made into a red line issue where disagreement isn't tolerated. I'm sick of hyperbolic analogies between issues like ChatGPT and serious crimes. (I could give an example I heard but it's so offensive I don't want to repeat it.)

I am fed up with leftists supporting authoritarianism, terrorism, and political assassinations. While moralizing about AI art.

So, please forgive me if I struggle to listen to all of online leftists' complaints with the charity they deserve. I am burnt out on this stuff at this point. 

I don't know how to fix the offline left, but I'm personally so relieved that I don't use microblogging anymore (i.e., Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads) and that I've mostly extricated myself from online leftist discourse otherwise. It's too crazymaking for me to stomach.

There are two philosophies on what the key to life is.

The first philosophy is that the key to life is separate yourself from the wretched masses of humanity by finding a special group of people that is above it all and becoming part of that group.

The second philosophy is that the key to life is to see the universal in your individual experience. And this means you are always stretching yourself to include more people, find connection with more people, show compassion and empathy to more people. But this is constantly uncomfortable because, again and again, you have to face the wretched masses of humanity and say "me too, me too, me too" (and realize you are one of them).

I am a total believer in the second philosophy and a hater of the first philosophy. (Not because it's easy, but because it's right!) To the extent I care about effective altruism, it's because of the second philosophy: expand the moral circle, value all lives equally, extend beyond national borders, consider non-human creatures.

When I see people in effective altruism evince the first philosophy, to me, this is a profane betrayal of the whole point of the movement.

One of the reasons (among several other important reasons) that rationalists piss me off so much is their whole worldview and subculture is based on the first philosophy. Even the word "rationalist" is about being superior to other people. If the rationalist community has one founder or leader, it would be Eliezer Yudkowsky. The way Eliezer Yudkowsky talks to and about other people, even people who are actively trying to help him or to understand him, is so hateful and so mean. He exhales contempt. And it isn't just Eliezer — you can go on LessWrong and read horrifying accounts of how some prominent people in the community have treated their employee or their romantic partner, with the stated justification that they are separate from and superior to others. Obviously there's a huge problem with racism, sexism, and anti-LGBT prejudice too, which are other ways of feeling separate and above.

There is no happiness to be found at the top of a hierarchy. Look at the people who think in the most hierarchical terms, who have climbed to the tops of the hierarchies they value. Are they happy? No. They're miserable. This is a game you can't win. It's a con. It's a lie.

In the beautiful words of the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, "The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!"

(Richard Rohr's episode of You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes is wonderful if you want to hear more.) 

Okay. Thanks. I guessed maybe that’s what you were trying to say. I didn’t even look at the paper. It’s just not clear from the post why you’re citing this paper and what point you’re trying to make about it. 

I agree that we can’t extrapolate from the claim "the most effective charities at fighting diseases in developing countries are 1,000x more effective than the average charity in that area" to "the most effective charities, in general, are 1,000x more effective than the average charity". 

If people are making the second claim, they definitely should be corrected. I already believed you that you’ve heard this claim before, but I’m also seeing corroboration from other comments that this is a commonly repeated claim. It seems like a case of people starting with a narrow claim that was true and then getting a little sloppy and generalizing it beyond what the evidence actually supports. 

Trying to say how much more effective the best charities are from the average charity seems like a dauntingly broad question, and I reckon the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. The Fred Hollows Foundation vs. seeing eye dog example gets the point across. 

Thank you for explaining. Kindness like this matters to me a lot, and it also matters a lot to me whether someone is aware that another person is in need of their kindness.