That’s a tricky one! I think that at both extremes it’s bad (so the answer lies somewhere between).
If no small donors are informed and carefully checking then I think evaluators would generally do a much worse job.
If all small donors needed to be sufficiently knowledgeable about effective giving before donating I think that it’d be a big waste of time, fewer people would give, and evaluators wouldn’t move enough money for their time to be worthwhile spent on it.
Generally, I’d prefer donors not be completely deferential and have at least a basic understanding of why they defer to a specific evaluator (at the moment I think this is super opaque to donors and we’re hoping to help change that). But I also worry about donors trying to reinvent the wheel, be overconfident that they can outperform evaluators, or get so lost in the details that they don’t end up giving.
My view is that it’ll likely depend more on the temperament and context of the donor (including how much they’re moving).
On a side note I think the donor lottery is a pretty interesting way of solving this (but feel like we probably need a few donor lotteries for it to work in an ideal way, such as a worldview diverse one and ones for specific worldviews so that you can at least think about worldviews before donating to the lottery).
That’s a tricky one! I think that at both extremes it’s bad (so the answer lies somewhere between).
If no small donors are informed and carefully checking then I think evaluators would generally do a much worse job.
If all small donors needed to be sufficiently knowledgeable about effective giving before donating I think that it’d be a big waste of time, fewer people would give, and evaluators wouldn’t move enough money for their time to be worthwhile spent on it.
Generally, I’d prefer donors not be completely deferential and have at least a basic understanding of why they defer to a specific evaluator (at the moment I think this is super opaque to donors and we’re hoping to help change that). But I also worry about donors trying to reinvent the wheel, be overconfident that they can outperform evaluators, or get so lost in the details that they don’t end up giving.
My view is that it’ll likely depend more on the temperament and context of the donor (including how much they’re moving).
On a side note I think the donor lottery is a pretty interesting way of solving this (but feel like we probably need a few donor lotteries for it to work in an ideal way, such as a worldview diverse one and ones for specific worldviews so that you can at least think about worldviews before donating to the lottery).