I find the self-regarding case for donating (that you have equal or higher expected value, since you have a lower probability of winning a proportionately higher amount, and you might benefit from donating at scale) pretty convincing.
I’m not about the other-regarding case for encouraging small donors in general to donate to the lottery however, i.e. whether this leads to a better or worse allocation of donations.
You mention one reason why this might lead to better donations: the winner will be incentivised to spend more time thinking about their donation than they otherwise would. However, it seems like there are some reasons why the allocation made by the single winner might be worse than the allocation made by each of the individual donors’ separate decisions. (I have not thought about donation lotteries very much so I am likely missing other considerations).
As you note, winning the donation lottery probably causes the individual donor to spend more time making their individual donation decision than they otherwise would. But it also likely leads to the individual donor allocating funds to a smaller number of donation targets than the individual donors to the lottery would have done had they donated separately, and probably leads to less money being donated to EA Funds than the individual donors would have done collectively. (I imagine that winning the donor lottery probably leads to people being less inclined to just donate the money to EA Funds, which might seem like a ‘waste’ of their win, which would signal that they don’t think they can make good donation decisions. It may also lead them to wanting to make novel or idiosyncratic donations decisions, rather than donating for similar reasons.) It’s pretty unclear to me that the individual winner (even with the advantage of spending somewhat more time on their decision than they otherwise would) would make a better allocation of the donations than would all the individual donors making their donation decisions separately (and potentially all acting a bit more deferentially/with different incentives than the lottery winner).
In terms of improving EA discourse and information it also seems unclear to me that the effect of one lottery winner thinking more about their donation decisions (and potentially writing it up) beats out the effect of all the other lottery donors thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
In terms of improving EA discourse and information it also seems unclear to me that the effect of one lottery winner thinking more about their donation decisions (and potentially writing it up) beats out the effect of all the other lottery donors thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
I think most donors giving most of their donations through the donor lottery is more likely to improve than worsen this because:
If most EAs participate in the lottery, we will have many lottery winners (not just a single one), who can jointly cover a lot of ground. (And if only few EAs participate, we will still have lots of EAs making direct donations.)
We explicitly encourage people to continue to make direct donations with some of their budget, so if people agree with this post, we will continue to have lots of people thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
At the current margin, I am pretty happy to trade shallow analysis for more deep analysis, as I think a lot of the shallow analyses will be similar to each other (so won’t provide as much viewpoint diversity as multiple deeper analyses).
I think most donors giving most of their donations through the donor lottery is more likely to improve than worsen this because:
If most EAs participate in the lottery, we will have many lottery winners (not just a single one), who can jointly cover a lot of ground. (And if only few EAs participate, we will still have lots of EAs making direct donations.)
I think the hypothetical state of affairs, where so many individual donors donate to the lottery that there are lots of lottery winners, is harder to intuitively evaluate than the closer counterfactuals where we have lots of individual donors or a much smaller number (~1-3) lottery winners. One might think that, to the extent that the same basic dynamic of converting many individual donors evaluating charities for themselves for 1 donor spending a bit longer evaluating for themself, the situation where you have lots winners (and even more people not donating for themselves) is not much better than the situation with just a small number of winners (and it may be proportionately worse). But I agree that the dynamics may well be different and non-linear, i.e. it could be than it’s optimal to have 15 winners looking into things a bit deeper than they would have as individual donors (and all the other donors not look into things hardly at all), because this leads to the best balance of ideas evaluated at different levels of depth, and it’s worse to have either fewer winners and more individual donors or more winners and fewer individual donors. But exactly what these dynamics are is unclear and this seems like the kind of thing we’d want to know in order to know whether to recommend donors in general to donate to the lottery, rather than to donate themselves, immediately defer to other grant-makers, or save for later.
We explicitly encourage people to continue to make direct donations with some of their budget, so if people agree with this post, we will continue to have lots of people thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
I think it’s good that you encourage this, but I’m not sure that this is going to be much of a safeguard. It seems quite likely that if people donate much of their donations through the lottery, then even if they continue to donate a small amount directly, many will spend much less time/effort considering or writing up these direct donations. This seems the natural mirror image of the fact that the donor lottery is expected to make the one donor more invested in taking their time to make a decision- it should make everyone else less engaged in their (remaining) donation decisions. Personally, I am more convinced of the latter (negative) effect than I am of the positive effect, but you might think it’s asymmetrical in the opposite direction. It’s also worth considering that, when people are donating a smaller amount of residual donations just to keep themselves engaged with ‘warm fuzzies’ / invested in their donations / engaged with the current state of EA research, this might lead them to take a different approach to thinking about their donations i.e. they might be more inclined to donate on a whim, in line with their ‘warm fuzzies’ confident that at least their EA lottery donation had high expected value. This would also lead to the loss of a lot of careful consideration of EA donation targets from a lot of EA donors.
I am pretty happy to trade shallow analysis for more deep analysis, as I think a lot of the shallow analyses will be similar to each other (so won’t provide as much viewpoint diversity as multiple deeper analyses).
I think “deeper” definitely sounds better than “shallower.” I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’d expect to see in this case though.
It seems the EA lottery basically induces one person to think about their donation decision a bit more than they personally would have done counterfactually, while (probably) inducing a number of other people to think about their donation decisions less. (I’ll leave aside the complication about trading even more individual donors for even more winners for now) As I noted above, I think we may lose a lot of depth across lots of individuals, and gain a bit of depth for onen individual, so it’s not so clear to me prima facie, which is better.
But another complication is that with lots of people donating individually you have a chance of getting a writeup from each of these. But you are probably disproportionately more likely to get an writeup out of some of the most informed and likely-to-write-a-deep-and-valuable-writeup of these people. So you might actually get a more deep writeup (in expectation) out of lots of individual donors than a randomly selected lottery donor who is incentivised to write more in depth than they personally would have otherwise. Now, one could speculate that a separate virtue of the randomisation is that although you are less likely to get an especially in-depth writeup from one of the more informed donors, you are more likely to get a moderately in-depth writeup from a non-typical donor who wouldn’t otherwise produce a writeup, so this might be better for viewpoint diversity. I don’t know exactly how to weight these considerations, but these seem like the kind of things which would determine whether we should be encouraging more small donors to donate to the lottery or not.
The question of whether we get more viewpoint diversity from one (or very few) lottery winner(s) thinking somewhat more deeping and (possibly) producing a writeup or more people thinking more about their donations (and possibly producing writeups) seems pretty uncertain. I acknowledge that it’s possible that the many individual donors might be more similar to each other and so produce less novel insight than single the lottery winner. It also seems quite possible that the one lottery winner thinking a bit more than they usually would doesn’t really produce much more novel insight and you get more diversity of thought having more people think about things individually. This may also be the case if, similar to my point about depth in the previous paragraph, most of the diversity/novelty comes from a small number of highly novel thinkers, and randomly selecting a winner just gives a roughly average (non-novel, non-diverse) answer.
As an aside, in general, if we were thinking of setups to best promote EA discourse and information I’m not sure the lottery setup would be among the ways we’d think of going about this. I may writeup something brief about this separately.
You mentioned that there are some reasons to think that the donor lottery would make things worse. I’ll try to rephrase them in my own words:
1. Donors might feel like they’re not supposed to give to EA Funds and come up with their own ideas instead.
This could be good if the donors allocate the money better than EA Funds could! Also, I think EAs are generally careful thinkers, so I expect many to successfully avoid this pitfall. I also think many will see this as a particularly good opportunity to carefully evaluate the EA Funds’ grantmaking, potentially resulting in a carefully reasoned donation to EA Funds or useful feedback that could lead to improvements. That said, if many donor lottery winners turned out to have a bias towards making their own grants, and had a less good track record than EA Funds, that would convince me that your concern is probably right. But I think it’s worth running a larger experiment before giving a lot of weight to these concerns.
2. Donors will allocate funds to a smaller number of donation targets.
If the worry is that smaller groups will have a harder time fundraising, I don’t think this will be the case (except to the extent that less promising projects don’t get funded after extra scrutiny). If, say, half of EA Funds donation volume was given through the donor lottery, we would have about 10-200 separate winners (depending on the lottery), who could jointly spread out their donations across a lot of smaller groups. (If it was only 10 people, hopefully they’d delegate some of the funding decisions to a larger set of people or committees, and I might suggest this to them in that case.) As mentioned in the post, the lottery could also make it easier to support new/smaller groups tax-deductibly. (It might also reduce admin overhead from donation processing.)
This [lottery winners feeling they should pick some specific charities to donate to the best of their abilities, rather than donating to EA Funds] could be good if the donors allocate the money better than EA Funds could!
This is certainly possible. But it also seems quite possible that the allocation made by a randomly selected donor (who thinks about it a bit more than they usually would but also feels distinctive pressure to, choose specific charities, rather than delegate the decision to the funds, and maybe other pressures as well) is worse than the allocation made by lots of individual donors, some/many of whom decide they can’t do better than to defer to the Funds.
That said, if many donor lottery winners turned out to have a bias towards making their own grants, and had a less good track record than EA Funds, that would convince me that your concern is probably right. But I think it’s worth running a larger experiment before giving a lot of weight to these concerns.
I agree an “experiment” might be informative. I think we should assign these various concerns quite high weight before we run an experiment though (although I’d be happy to be talked into thinking that they are less likely than I currently think they are). Whether we should then run the experiment depends presumably on how great and how likely the possible benefits and costs seem to be, including how easily we think we could retrench the costs of the experiment if they turned out to be real (e.g. convince people that they shouldn’t donate to the lottery after all and should instead be deferring or donating directly).
I think if we view this as an experiment (but grant that it may well lead to worse allocations of donations overall and reduce discourse and information quality for the community), that would make sense, but that the recommendation in the original post that most small donors donate to the EA lottery should be presented much more tentatively (making clear that this is an experiment that might lead to worse outcomes and will need to be re-evaluated in the future). This would reduce costs in the event that it turns out that it’s actually better to encourage many donors to donate directly themselves, defer to the Funds, save to donate later etc.
If the worry is that smaller groups will have a harder time fundraising, I don’t think this will be the case
This actually wasn’t one of my concerns. It does seem pretty clear that donations would be allocated across a smaller number of donation targets, if they are decided by only a small number of lottery winners. (Historically, it seems that each winner has selected only 1-4 donation targets. It’s less clear if we have as many as 200 winners, but that seems relatively unlikely in the near term). Donations being allocated to a much smaller number of donation targets than they would be if donors made their allocations separately could be better or it could be worse, it seems quite hard to tell.
Generally, it seems like there are a lot of considerations that would determine whether most small donors donating to the lottery should be expected to be a positive or negative move (mostly depending on whether the allocation made by a small number of randomly selected donors (influenced by certain conditions) is better than the allocation made by a larger number of individual donors (in different conditions) and which of these has the better influence on EA discourse and information, including depth of investigation, diversity of thought and novelty of experimentation etc.), whereas the original post seems to present the situation as being quite straightforward (based largely on the one argument about how the winner(s) will be in a better position to make decisions than those particular individuals would have been if they didn’t win. That said I’m sure you’ve thought about these questions more than me so your intuitions about them likely better tutored than mine.
Yeah, I think the case of people not wanting to donate to EA Funds because of social/community dynamics (even if they think, on reflection, that they can’t outperform EA Funds) is an interesting one. I guess that if someone is unsure if they can beat EA Funds (or some other ‘boring’/deferent option) but that they feel like they’d be subject to social pressure to do something different regardless, that they could always enter anonymously (this doesn’t solve the problem of people wanting to prove to themselves that they’re good grantmakers, but hopefully goes some way to mitigating the issue).
We’re also trying to provide good support to winners, in the form of contact with experienced grantmakers (including members from each of the EA Funds). So, to the extent that this enables winners to ‘import’ that experience into their decision, while still being able to cast a wider net, it means that even less-confident donors will still be able to remain competitive with alternatives.
I find the self-regarding case for donating (that you have equal or higher expected value, since you have a lower probability of winning a proportionately higher amount, and you might benefit from donating at scale) pretty convincing.
I’m not about the other-regarding case for encouraging small donors in general to donate to the lottery however, i.e. whether this leads to a better or worse allocation of donations.
You mention one reason why this might lead to better donations: the winner will be incentivised to spend more time thinking about their donation than they otherwise would. However, it seems like there are some reasons why the allocation made by the single winner might be worse than the allocation made by each of the individual donors’ separate decisions. (I have not thought about donation lotteries very much so I am likely missing other considerations).
As you note, winning the donation lottery probably causes the individual donor to spend more time making their individual donation decision than they otherwise would. But it also likely leads to the individual donor allocating funds to a smaller number of donation targets than the individual donors to the lottery would have done had they donated separately, and probably leads to less money being donated to EA Funds than the individual donors would have done collectively. (I imagine that winning the donor lottery probably leads to people being less inclined to just donate the money to EA Funds, which might seem like a ‘waste’ of their win, which would signal that they don’t think they can make good donation decisions. It may also lead them to wanting to make novel or idiosyncratic donations decisions, rather than donating for similar reasons.) It’s pretty unclear to me that the individual winner (even with the advantage of spending somewhat more time on their decision than they otherwise would) would make a better allocation of the donations than would all the individual donors making their donation decisions separately (and potentially all acting a bit more deferentially/with different incentives than the lottery winner).
In terms of improving EA discourse and information it also seems unclear to me that the effect of one lottery winner thinking more about their donation decisions (and potentially writing it up) beats out the effect of all the other lottery donors thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
(I’ll post two replies as separate threads.)
I think most donors giving most of their donations through the donor lottery is more likely to improve than worsen this because:
If most EAs participate in the lottery, we will have many lottery winners (not just a single one), who can jointly cover a lot of ground. (And if only few EAs participate, we will still have lots of EAs making direct donations.)
We explicitly encourage people to continue to make direct donations with some of their budget, so if people agree with this post, we will continue to have lots of people thinking about their donation decisions (and potentially writing them up).
At the current margin, I am pretty happy to trade shallow analysis for more deep analysis, as I think a lot of the shallow analyses will be similar to each other (so won’t provide as much viewpoint diversity as multiple deeper analyses).
Thanks for your replies!
If most EAs participate in the lottery, we will have many lottery winners (not just a single one), who can jointly cover a lot of ground. (And if only few EAs participate, we will still have lots of EAs making direct donations.)
I think the hypothetical state of affairs, where so many individual donors donate to the lottery that there are lots of lottery winners, is harder to intuitively evaluate than the closer counterfactuals where we have lots of individual donors or a much smaller number (~1-3) lottery winners. One might think that, to the extent that the same basic dynamic of converting many individual donors evaluating charities for themselves for 1 donor spending a bit longer evaluating for themself, the situation where you have lots winners (and even more people not donating for themselves) is not much better than the situation with just a small number of winners (and it may be proportionately worse). But I agree that the dynamics may well be different and non-linear, i.e. it could be than it’s optimal to have 15 winners looking into things a bit deeper than they would have as individual donors (and all the other donors not look into things hardly at all), because this leads to the best balance of ideas evaluated at different levels of depth, and it’s worse to have either fewer winners and more individual donors or more winners and fewer individual donors. But exactly what these dynamics are is unclear and this seems like the kind of thing we’d want to know in order to know whether to recommend donors in general to donate to the lottery, rather than to donate themselves, immediately defer to other grant-makers, or save for later.
I think it’s good that you encourage this, but I’m not sure that this is going to be much of a safeguard. It seems quite likely that if people donate much of their donations through the lottery, then even if they continue to donate a small amount directly, many will spend much less time/effort considering or writing up these direct donations. This seems the natural mirror image of the fact that the donor lottery is expected to make the one donor more invested in taking their time to make a decision- it should make everyone else less engaged in their (remaining) donation decisions. Personally, I am more convinced of the latter (negative) effect than I am of the positive effect, but you might think it’s asymmetrical in the opposite direction. It’s also worth considering that, when people are donating a smaller amount of residual donations just to keep themselves engaged with ‘warm fuzzies’ / invested in their donations / engaged with the current state of EA research, this might lead them to take a different approach to thinking about their donations i.e. they might be more inclined to donate on a whim, in line with their ‘warm fuzzies’ confident that at least their EA lottery donation had high expected value. This would also lead to the loss of a lot of careful consideration of EA donation targets from a lot of EA donors.
I think “deeper” definitely sounds better than “shallower.” I’m not sure that’s exactly what I’d expect to see in this case though.
It seems the EA lottery basically induces one person to think about their donation decision a bit more than they personally would have done counterfactually, while (probably) inducing a number of other people to think about their donation decisions less. (I’ll leave aside the complication about trading even more individual donors for even more winners for now) As I noted above, I think we may lose a lot of depth across lots of individuals, and gain a bit of depth for onen individual, so it’s not so clear to me prima facie, which is better.
But another complication is that with lots of people donating individually you have a chance of getting a writeup from each of these. But you are probably disproportionately more likely to get an writeup out of some of the most informed and likely-to-write-a-deep-and-valuable-writeup of these people. So you might actually get a more deep writeup (in expectation) out of lots of individual donors than a randomly selected lottery donor who is incentivised to write more in depth than they personally would have otherwise. Now, one could speculate that a separate virtue of the randomisation is that although you are less likely to get an especially in-depth writeup from one of the more informed donors, you are more likely to get a moderately in-depth writeup from a non-typical donor who wouldn’t otherwise produce a writeup, so this might be better for viewpoint diversity. I don’t know exactly how to weight these considerations, but these seem like the kind of things which would determine whether we should be encouraging more small donors to donate to the lottery or not.
The question of whether we get more viewpoint diversity from one (or very few) lottery winner(s) thinking somewhat more deeping and (possibly) producing a writeup or more people thinking more about their donations (and possibly producing writeups) seems pretty uncertain. I acknowledge that it’s possible that the many individual donors might be more similar to each other and so produce less novel insight than single the lottery winner. It also seems quite possible that the one lottery winner thinking a bit more than they usually would doesn’t really produce much more novel insight and you get more diversity of thought having more people think about things individually. This may also be the case if, similar to my point about depth in the previous paragraph, most of the diversity/novelty comes from a small number of highly novel thinkers, and randomly selecting a winner just gives a roughly average (non-novel, non-diverse) answer.
As an aside, in general, if we were thinking of setups to best promote EA discourse and information I’m not sure the lottery setup would be among the ways we’d think of going about this. I may writeup something brief about this separately.
(I’ll post two replies as separate threads.)
Thanks for the critique!
You mentioned that there are some reasons to think that the donor lottery would make things worse. I’ll try to rephrase them in my own words:
1. Donors might feel like they’re not supposed to give to EA Funds and come up with their own ideas instead.
This could be good if the donors allocate the money better than EA Funds could! Also, I think EAs are generally careful thinkers, so I expect many to successfully avoid this pitfall. I also think many will see this as a particularly good opportunity to carefully evaluate the EA Funds’ grantmaking, potentially resulting in a carefully reasoned donation to EA Funds or useful feedback that could lead to improvements. That said, if many donor lottery winners turned out to have a bias towards making their own grants, and had a less good track record than EA Funds, that would convince me that your concern is probably right. But I think it’s worth running a larger experiment before giving a lot of weight to these concerns.
2. Donors will allocate funds to a smaller number of donation targets.
If the worry is that smaller groups will have a harder time fundraising, I don’t think this will be the case (except to the extent that less promising projects don’t get funded after extra scrutiny). If, say, half of EA Funds donation volume was given through the donor lottery, we would have about 10-200 separate winners (depending on the lottery), who could jointly spread out their donations across a lot of smaller groups. (If it was only 10 people, hopefully they’d delegate some of the funding decisions to a larger set of people or committees, and I might suggest this to them in that case.) As mentioned in the post, the lottery could also make it easier to support new/smaller groups tax-deductibly. (It might also reduce admin overhead from donation processing.)
This is certainly possible. But it also seems quite possible that the allocation made by a randomly selected donor (who thinks about it a bit more than they usually would but also feels distinctive pressure to, choose specific charities, rather than delegate the decision to the funds, and maybe other pressures as well) is worse than the allocation made by lots of individual donors, some/many of whom decide they can’t do better than to defer to the Funds.
I agree an “experiment” might be informative. I think we should assign these various concerns quite high weight before we run an experiment though (although I’d be happy to be talked into thinking that they are less likely than I currently think they are). Whether we should then run the experiment depends presumably on how great and how likely the possible benefits and costs seem to be, including how easily we think we could retrench the costs of the experiment if they turned out to be real (e.g. convince people that they shouldn’t donate to the lottery after all and should instead be deferring or donating directly).
I think if we view this as an experiment (but grant that it may well lead to worse allocations of donations overall and reduce discourse and information quality for the community), that would make sense, but that the recommendation in the original post that most small donors donate to the EA lottery should be presented much more tentatively (making clear that this is an experiment that might lead to worse outcomes and will need to be re-evaluated in the future). This would reduce costs in the event that it turns out that it’s actually better to encourage many donors to donate directly themselves, defer to the Funds, save to donate later etc.
This actually wasn’t one of my concerns. It does seem pretty clear that donations would be allocated across a smaller number of donation targets, if they are decided by only a small number of lottery winners. (Historically, it seems that each winner has selected only 1-4 donation targets. It’s less clear if we have as many as 200 winners, but that seems relatively unlikely in the near term). Donations being allocated to a much smaller number of donation targets than they would be if donors made their allocations separately could be better or it could be worse, it seems quite hard to tell.
Generally, it seems like there are a lot of considerations that would determine whether most small donors donating to the lottery should be expected to be a positive or negative move (mostly depending on whether the allocation made by a small number of randomly selected donors (influenced by certain conditions) is better than the allocation made by a larger number of individual donors (in different conditions) and which of these has the better influence on EA discourse and information, including depth of investigation, diversity of thought and novelty of experimentation etc.), whereas the original post seems to present the situation as being quite straightforward (based largely on the one argument about how the winner(s) will be in a better position to make decisions than those particular individuals would have been if they didn’t win. That said I’m sure you’ve thought about these questions more than me so your intuitions about them likely better tutored than mine.
Yeah, I think the case of people not wanting to donate to EA Funds because of social/community dynamics (even if they think, on reflection, that they can’t outperform EA Funds) is an interesting one. I guess that if someone is unsure if they can beat EA Funds (or some other ‘boring’/deferent option) but that they feel like they’d be subject to social pressure to do something different regardless, that they could always enter anonymously (this doesn’t solve the problem of people wanting to prove to themselves that they’re good grantmakers, but hopefully goes some way to mitigating the issue).
We’re also trying to provide good support to winners, in the form of contact with experienced grantmakers (including members from each of the EA Funds). So, to the extent that this enables winners to ‘import’ that experience into their decision, while still being able to cast a wider net, it means that even less-confident donors will still be able to remain competitive with alternatives.