As Carl points out here, if big donors have better opportunities than small donors, the small donors can just purchase lotteries. In fact I think that you can get more than a 50% chance of doubling your money using typical risky investments, though this gets into a more complicated discussion about risk. $200,000 is small enough that you probably have access to the typical EA opportunities, so I suspect you shouldn’t do anything differently than smaller EA donors.
That said, I suspect that smaller EA donors should behave quite differently than they currently do, and thinking about what you might do with more money can serve to make this more clear.
edited to add: I also think it’s plausible that at the $100k level a donor should still be saving / trying to pool their money / being risk-loving / just giving it to existing EA orgs, because the amounts of time required to make a good decision even at the meta level—unless you’ve already found someone you trust who you can just hand the money to.
If some of the ideas generated here seem robustly better than the normal opportunities available to small donors, then the small donors should also consider grouping together to fund them.
As Carl points out here, if big donors have better opportunities than small donors, the small donors can just purchase lotteries. In fact I think that you can get more than a 50% chance of doubling your money using typical risky investments, though this gets into a more complicated discussion about risk. $200,000 is small enough that you probably have access to the typical EA opportunities, so I suspect you shouldn’t do anything differently than smaller EA donors.
That said, I suspect that smaller EA donors should behave quite differently than they currently do, and thinking about what you might do with more money can serve to make this more clear.
edited to add: I also think it’s plausible that at the $100k level a donor should still be saving / trying to pool their money / being risk-loving / just giving it to existing EA orgs, because the amounts of time required to make a good decision even at the meta level—unless you’ve already found someone you trust who you can just hand the money to.
If some of the ideas generated here seem robustly better than the normal opportunities available to small donors, then the small donors should also consider grouping together to fund them.