> but also in the other 80% of worlds you have a preference for your money being allocated by people who are more thoughtful.
For the CEA donor lottery, the pot size is fixed independent of one’s entry as the guarantor (Paul Christiano last year, the regranting pool I am administering this year) puts in funds for any unclaimed tickets. So the distribution of funding amounts for each entrant is unaffected by other entrants. It’s set up this way specifically so that people don’t even have to think about the sort of effect you discuss (the backstop fund has ~linear value of funds over the relevant range, so that isn’t an impact either).
The only thing that participating in the same lottery block as someone else matters for is correlations between your donations and theirs. E.g. if you would wind up choosing a different charity to give to depending on whether another participant won the lottery. But normally the behavior of one other donor wouldn’t change what you think is the best opportunity.
> but also in the other 80% of worlds you have a preference for your money being allocated by people who are more thoughtful.
For the CEA donor lottery, the pot size is fixed independent of one’s entry as the guarantor (Paul Christiano last year, the regranting pool I am administering this year) puts in funds for any unclaimed tickets. So the distribution of funding amounts for each entrant is unaffected by other entrants. It’s set up this way specifically so that people don’t even have to think about the sort of effect you discuss (the backstop fund has ~linear value of funds over the relevant range, so that isn’t an impact either).
The only thing that participating in the same lottery block as someone else matters for is correlations between your donations and theirs. E.g. if you would wind up choosing a different charity to give to depending on whether another participant won the lottery. But normally the behavior of one other donor wouldn’t change what you think is the best opportunity.
That all makes a lot of sense! Thanks.