Of course, EA funds can do all of these things, and I appreciate the work they are doing.
I think it is important to be explicit about the structure of EA funds, meta-charities, and charitable foundations: they typically involve pooling money from many donors and putting funding decisions in the hands of a few people. This is not a criticism! It makes a lot of sense to turn these decisions over to knowledgeable, committed specialists in the EA community. This approach likely improves the impact of peoples donations over the counterfactual where people give directly to charities without considering how other are donating.
While I appreciate this system, I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least consider other systems of collective donation. It seems worthwhile to explore other approaches before settling on one specific model of collective giving.
Also, it seems like you have more faith than me in the collective wisdom of many non-experts, compared to a team of experts whose job is to work on the questions full-time.
Under the right circumstances, many non-experts can and do outperform experts. Tetlock’s Superforcasting and prediction markets are good examples of this. That being said, I am highly uncertain as to whether these conditions hold for charitable donation, so experimentation with different funding models seems valuable.
Strongly agree with trying to think about creative ways of effectively pooling wisdom together to make better donations collectively. Prediction markets, as you point out, is an example of a really high-impact related idea, so there might be more in the vicinity. I should’ve made that clear from the start. I just don’t think this particular suggestion (Iterative Public Donation) beats what we’ve currently got. But, as I’ve said, I like the way you think. :)
Of course, EA funds can do all of these things, and I appreciate the work they are doing.
I think it is important to be explicit about the structure of EA funds, meta-charities, and charitable foundations: they typically involve pooling money from many donors and putting funding decisions in the hands of a few people. This is not a criticism! It makes a lot of sense to turn these decisions over to knowledgeable, committed specialists in the EA community. This approach likely improves the impact of peoples donations over the counterfactual where people give directly to charities without considering how other are donating.
While I appreciate this system, I don’t see why we shouldn’t at least consider other systems of collective donation. It seems worthwhile to explore other approaches before settling on one specific model of collective giving.
Under the right circumstances, many non-experts can and do outperform experts. Tetlock’s Superforcasting and prediction markets are good examples of this. That being said, I am highly uncertain as to whether these conditions hold for charitable donation, so experimentation with different funding models seems valuable.
Strongly agree with trying to think about creative ways of effectively pooling wisdom together to make better donations collectively. Prediction markets, as you point out, is an example of a really high-impact related idea, so there might be more in the vicinity. I should’ve made that clear from the start. I just don’t think this particular suggestion (Iterative Public Donation) beats what we’ve currently got. But, as I’ve said, I like the way you think. :)