My guess is reports in Adam’s style are likely net negative, because they will nudge the lottery winners toward donations which are publicly justifiable, and away from supporting things which are really new, small, high-risk, or their funding depends on knowledge which isn’t public or easily shareable.
Institutional funding sources are biased toward conservatism, big grants, and either established, or at least started by established individuals.
Lottery winners are in a good position to counter that bias (ca in the style of a pop-up foundation advocated for by Tyler Cowen). My guess is, donor lottery winners can have ~2-10x more impact that way in comparison to funding projects which more traditional funding sources would also fund. Hence, any pressure toward “be more like institutional funders” and away from “pop-up” is likely net negative.
What about a report along the lines of ‘I am donating in support of X, for highly illegible reasons relating to my intuition from looking at their work, and private information I have about them personally’?
That would be fine—my worry was about the 2017 report pushing standards / expectations in a direction which I think will lead to less impact long-term.
This worry is not entirely hypothetical: note for example the comment by aarongertler, an EA forum moderator
This is fantastic! I hope we’ll see reports like this from the winners of any future donor lotteries run within the community.
(To be clear, I also want to add that Adam did a great job carefully reviewing the organizations and approaching the problem with IMO similar level of rigor as an established funding organization, and I admire the work. I just want to avoid this approach becoming something which is expected.)
I agree reports like Adam’s will move people from B to A, but I think they will also move people from C to A, by forcing them to examine their choices more carefully and hold themselves to a higher standard.
This model prompts two possible sources of disagreement: you could disagree about the relative proportions of people moving from B vs. from C, or you could disagree about how bad it is to have a mix of B and C vs. more A.
To address the second question, if you think that B is 2-10x more valuable than A, then even if donations in category C are worthless (leaving aside the chance they are net negative), an equal mix of B and C is better than just A, and towards the 10x end of that spectrum, you can justify up to 90% C and 10% B.
But let’s return to that parenthetical – could more C donations be net negative, even aside from opportunity cost? I think this risk is underexamined. I suspect most projects won’t directly do harm, but well-funded blunders are more visible and reputationally damaging.
I think 2-10x is the wrong average multiplier across lottery winners (though, in fairness, you didn’t explicitly claim it was an average). In order to make good grants to new small high-risk things, you need to hear about them, and I suspect most lottery participants don’t have the necessary networks and don’t have special access to significant private information – after all, private information doesn’t spread well.
Concretely I’m suggesting that the median lottery participant doesn’t get any benefit at all from the ability to use private information.
I disagree. You should not have as a central example some sort of secret, but trust. Transitivity of trust is limited, and everybody has a unique position in the trust network. Many will have interesting opportunities in their network neighborhoods. (I don’t claim to be typical, but still: I can easily list maybe a dozen of such not easily justifiable opportunities where I could send money; even if I’m somewhere on the tail on the distribution, I’d guess typical lottery winner has at leas 1 or 2 such opportunitites)
That the use of the funds will be worse when writing a report is plausible. Do you also think that reports change others’ giving either negligibly or negatively?
Winning the lottery likely amplifies the voice of the winner, but the effect may be conditional on how much credibility the winner had beforehand. So far, the lottery winners were highly trusted people working in central organizations.
Overall, I would estimate the indirect effect on giving by other individual donors is with 90% confidence within 3x the size of the direct effect, with an unclear sign. There is a significant competition for the attention (and money) of individual donors
My guess is reports in Adam’s style are likely net negative, because they will nudge the lottery winners toward donations which are publicly justifiable, and away from supporting things which are really new, small, high-risk, or their funding depends on knowledge which isn’t public or easily shareable.
Institutional funding sources are biased toward conservatism, big grants, and either established, or at least started by established individuals.
Lottery winners are in a good position to counter that bias (ca in the style of a pop-up foundation advocated for by Tyler Cowen). My guess is, donor lottery winners can have ~2-10x more impact that way in comparison to funding projects which more traditional funding sources would also fund. Hence, any pressure toward “be more like institutional funders” and away from “pop-up” is likely net negative.
What about a report along the lines of ‘I am donating in support of X, for highly illegible reasons relating to my intuition from looking at their work, and private information I have about them personally’?
That would be fine—my worry was about the 2017 report pushing standards / expectations in a direction which I think will lead to less impact long-term.
This worry is not entirely hypothetical: note for example the comment by aarongertler, an EA forum moderator
(To be clear, I also want to add that Adam did a great job carefully reviewing the organizations and approaching the problem with IMO similar level of rigor as an established funding organization, and I admire the work. I just want to avoid this approach becoming something which is expected.)
We can imagine three categories of grants:
A. Publically justifiable
B. Privately justifiable
C. Unjustifiable :)
I agree reports like Adam’s will move people from B to A, but I think they will also move people from C to A, by forcing them to examine their choices more carefully and hold themselves to a higher standard.
This model prompts two possible sources of disagreement: you could disagree about the relative proportions of people moving from B vs. from C, or you could disagree about how bad it is to have a mix of B and C vs. more A.
To address the second question, if you think that B is 2-10x more valuable than A, then even if donations in category C are worthless (leaving aside the chance they are net negative), an equal mix of B and C is better than just A, and towards the 10x end of that spectrum, you can justify up to 90% C and 10% B.
But let’s return to that parenthetical – could more C donations be net negative, even aside from opportunity cost? I think this risk is underexamined. I suspect most projects won’t directly do harm, but well-funded blunders are more visible and reputationally damaging.
I think 2-10x is the wrong average multiplier across lottery winners (though, in fairness, you didn’t explicitly claim it was an average). In order to make good grants to new small high-risk things, you need to hear about them, and I suspect most lottery participants don’t have the necessary networks and don’t have special access to significant private information – after all, private information doesn’t spread well.
Concretely I’m suggesting that the median lottery participant doesn’t get any benefit at all from the ability to use private information.
I disagree. You should not have as a central example some sort of secret, but trust. Transitivity of trust is limited, and everybody has a unique position in the trust network. Many will have interesting opportunities in their network neighborhoods. (I don’t claim to be typical, but still: I can easily list maybe a dozen of such not easily justifiable opportunities where I could send money; even if I’m somewhere on the tail on the distribution, I’d guess typical lottery winner has at leas 1 or 2 such opportunitites)
That the use of the funds will be worse when writing a report is plausible. Do you also think that reports change others’ giving either negligibly or negatively?
It’s hard to estimate.
Winning the lottery likely amplifies the voice of the winner, but the effect may be conditional on how much credibility the winner had beforehand. So far, the lottery winners were highly trusted people working in central organizations.
Overall, I would estimate the indirect effect on giving by other individual donors is with 90% confidence within 3x the size of the direct effect, with an unclear sign. There is a significant competition for the attention (and money) of individual donors