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.
(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.