You’re right that I had subtly become nervous about joining the donor lottery because “then I’d have to do all the work that Adam did”. Thanks for reminding me I don’t have to if it doesn’t seem worth the opportunity cost, and that I can just donate to whatever seems like the best opportunity given my own models :)
I don’t think this is true. The probabilities and payouts are the same for any given participant, regardless of what others do, so people who are unlikely to write up a report don’t reduce the average number of reports produced by those who would.
I think it does, it just is unlikely to change it by all that much.
Imagine there are two donor lotteries, each one having had 40k donated to them, one with lots of people in the lottery you think are very thoughtful about what projects to donate to, and one with lots of people in the lottery you think are not thoughtful about what projects to donate to. You’re considering which to add your 10k to. In either one the returns are good in expectation purely based on you getting a 20% chance to 5x your donation (which is good if you think there’s increasing marginal returns to money at this level), but also in the other 80% of worlds you have a preference for your money being allocated by people who are more thoughtful.
This isn’t the main consideration—unless you think the other people will do something actively very harmful with the money. You’d have to think that the other people will (in expectation) do something worse with a marginal 10k than you giving away 10k does good.
> 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.
Carl’s comment renders this irrelevant for CEA lotteries, but I think this reasoning is wrong even for the type of lotteries you imagine.
In either one the returns are good in expectation purely based on you getting a 20% chance to 5x your donation (which is good if you think there’s increasing marginal returns to money at this level), but also in the other 80% of worlds you have a preference for your money being allocated by people who are more thoughtful.
What you’re forgetting is that in the 20 % of worlds where you get your donation, you’d rather have been in the pool without thoughtful people. If you were, you will get to regrant 50k smartly, and a thoughtful person will get to regrant 40k. However, if you were in the pool with thoughtful people, the thoughtful people won’t get to regrant any money, and the 40k in the thoughtless group will go to some thoughtless cause.
When joining a group (under your assumptions, that aren’t true for CEA), you increase the winnings of everyone while decreasing the probability that they win. In expectation, they all get to regrant the same amount of money. So the only situation where the decision between groups matter is if you have some very specific ideas about marginal utility, e.g. if you want to ensure that there exists at least one thoughtful lottery winner, and don’t care much about the second.
But insofar as the lottery enhances the effectiveness of donors (by letting them invest more in research if they win, amortized against a larger donation), then you want donors doing good to be enhanced and donors doing bad not to be enhanced. So you might want to try to avoid boosting pot size available to bad donors, and ensure good donors have large pots available. The CEA lottery is structured so that question doesn’t arise.
There is also the minor issue of correlation with other donors in the same block mentioned in the above comment, although you could ask CEA for a separate block if some unusual situation meant your donation plans would change a lot if you found out another block participant had won.
I think there are busy people will have the connections to make a good grant but won’t have the time to write a full report. In fact, I think there are many competent people that are very busy.
Other reasons why someone competent at picking grants may not feel comfortable with the thought of having to write a report might be because writing specifically isn’t their strength or because exposing their thinking to public scrutiny might be anxiety-inducing.
I guess it depends on the details of the returns to scale for donors. If there are returns to scale across the whole range of possible values of the donor lottery, as long as one person who would do lots of work/has good judgment joins the donor lottery, we should be excited about less conscientious people joining as well.
To be more concrete, imagine the amount of good you can do with a donation goes with the square of the donation. Let’s suppose one person who will be a good donor joins the lottery with $1. Everyone else in the lottery will make a neutral donation if they win. The expected value of the lottery is (good person’s chance of winning) * (total pool)² = (1/total pool) * (total pool)² = total pool.
Obviously that exact model is a bit contrived, but it points at why non-report-writing people still bring value in a lottery
Except that the pot size isn’t constrained by the participation of small donors: the CEA donor lottery has fixed pot sizes guaranteed by large donors, and the largest donors could be ~risk-neutral over lotteries with pots of many millions of donors. So there is no effect of this kind, and there is unlikely to ever be one except at ludicrously large scales (where one could use derivatives or the like to get similar effects).
You’re right that I had subtly become nervous about joining the donor lottery because “then I’d have to do all the work that Adam did”. Thanks for reminding me I don’t have to if it doesn’t seem worth the opportunity cost, and that I can just donate to whatever seems like the best opportunity given my own models :)
It may be a good thing that people that are less inclined to write up a report will be less likely to join a donor lottery.
I don’t think this is true. The probabilities and payouts are the same for any given participant, regardless of what others do, so people who are unlikely to write up a report don’t reduce the average number of reports produced by those who would.
It actually doesn’t make a difference in terms of expected value
I think it does, it just is unlikely to change it by all that much.
Imagine there are two donor lotteries, each one having had 40k donated to them, one with lots of people in the lottery you think are very thoughtful about what projects to donate to, and one with lots of people in the lottery you think are not thoughtful about what projects to donate to. You’re considering which to add your 10k to. In either one the returns are good in expectation purely based on you getting a 20% chance to 5x your donation (which is good if you think there’s increasing marginal returns to money at this level), but also in the other 80% of worlds you have a preference for your money being allocated by people who are more thoughtful.
This isn’t the main consideration—unless you think the other people will do something actively very harmful with the money. You’d have to think that the other people will (in expectation) do something worse with a marginal 10k than you giving away 10k does good.
> 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.
Carl’s comment renders this irrelevant for CEA lotteries, but I think this reasoning is wrong even for the type of lotteries you imagine.
What you’re forgetting is that in the 20 % of worlds where you get your donation, you’d rather have been in the pool without thoughtful people. If you were, you will get to regrant 50k smartly, and a thoughtful person will get to regrant 40k. However, if you were in the pool with thoughtful people, the thoughtful people won’t get to regrant any money, and the 40k in the thoughtless group will go to some thoughtless cause.
When joining a group (under your assumptions, that aren’t true for CEA), you increase the winnings of everyone while decreasing the probability that they win. In expectation, they all get to regrant the same amount of money. So the only situation where the decision between groups matter is if you have some very specific ideas about marginal utility, e.g. if you want to ensure that there exists at least one thoughtful lottery winner, and don’t care much about the second.
Yes, the main effect balances out like that.
But insofar as the lottery enhances the effectiveness of donors (by letting them invest more in research if they win, amortized against a larger donation), then you want donors doing good to be enhanced and donors doing bad not to be enhanced. So you might want to try to avoid boosting pot size available to bad donors, and ensure good donors have large pots available. The CEA lottery is structured so that question doesn’t arise.
There is also the minor issue of correlation with other donors in the same block mentioned in the above comment, although you could ask CEA for a separate block if some unusual situation meant your donation plans would change a lot if you found out another block participant had won.
I think there are busy people will have the connections to make a good grant but won’t have the time to write a full report. In fact, I think there are many competent people that are very busy.
Other reasons why someone competent at picking grants may not feel comfortable with the thought of having to write a report might be because writing specifically isn’t their strength or because exposing their thinking to public scrutiny might be anxiety-inducing.
Or because their best granting opportunity can’t be justified with publically-available knowledge, or has other weird optics / reputational concerns.
I guess it depends on the details of the returns to scale for donors. If there are returns to scale across the whole range of possible values of the donor lottery, as long as one person who would do lots of work/has good judgment joins the donor lottery, we should be excited about less conscientious people joining as well.
To be more concrete, imagine the amount of good you can do with a donation goes with the square of the donation. Let’s suppose one person who will be a good donor joins the lottery with $1. Everyone else in the lottery will make a neutral donation if they win. The expected value of the lottery is (good person’s chance of winning) * (total pool)² = (1/total pool) * (total pool)² = total pool.
Obviously that exact model is a bit contrived, but it points at why non-report-writing people still bring value in a lottery
Except that the pot size isn’t constrained by the participation of small donors: the CEA donor lottery has fixed pot sizes guaranteed by large donors, and the largest donors could be ~risk-neutral over lotteries with pots of many millions of donors. So there is no effect of this kind, and there is unlikely to ever be one except at ludicrously large scales (where one could use derivatives or the like to get similar effects).
Thanks for highlighting in this comment. It don’t think I made that prominent enough in the post itself