My main worry about donor lottery reports is somewhat different. Usually, people seem to assign some extra credibility to a donor’s reasoning if the donation/s is/are large. This seems reasonable to me, since donors who donate large sums often have a lot more experience with making donation decisions. But donor lottery winners have much less expertise than the average person who makes large donations (and only just as much as those long-term large donors had when they made a large donation for the first time).
In sum my concern is that people will trust donor lottery winner’s evaluations of donation targets more than they should.
This is a good point, and worth highlighting in discussion of reports (especially as we get more data on the effects of winning on donation patterns). On the other hand, the average depth and quality of investigation by winners (and the access they got) does seem higher than what they would otherwise have done, whilst less than expert donors.
This seems like an important worry. I’ve updated the main post to state that I’m now unclear whether reports are good or bad (because it seems like most of the effect comes from how others’ use the information in the reports, and it’s unclear to me whether they will mostly improve or worsen their judgement).
I do think that (a) people will discount lottery winners at least a bit relative to donors of the same size and (b) it’s good to introduce input on funding evaluation from someone with errors that are (relatively) uncorrelated with major funding bodies’ errors.
My main worry about donor lottery reports is somewhat different. Usually, people seem to assign some extra credibility to a donor’s reasoning if the donation/s is/are large. This seems reasonable to me, since donors who donate large sums often have a lot more experience with making donation decisions. But donor lottery winners have much less expertise than the average person who makes large donations (and only just as much as those long-term large donors had when they made a large donation for the first time).
In sum my concern is that people will trust donor lottery winner’s evaluations of donation targets more than they should.
This is a good point, and worth highlighting in discussion of reports (especially as we get more data on the effects of winning on donation patterns). On the other hand, the average depth and quality of investigation by winners (and the access they got) does seem higher than what they would otherwise have done, whilst less than expert donors.
This seems like an important worry. I’ve updated the main post to state that I’m now unclear whether reports are good or bad (because it seems like most of the effect comes from how others’ use the information in the reports, and it’s unclear to me whether they will mostly improve or worsen their judgement).
I do think that (a) people will discount lottery winners at least a bit relative to donors of the same size and (b) it’s good to introduce input on funding evaluation from someone with errors that are (relatively) uncorrelated with major funding bodies’ errors.