As mentioned, I’m offering a bunch of alternatives—not all of which I support—to help us examine our current system. ‘Reverse-donation-weighted’ in particular is more of a prompt to “why do we think donation-weighting is normal or unproblematic—what might we be missing out on or reinforcing with donation-weighting?”
Note that the current ‘donor lottery’ is a form of random donor pooling—but with donation-weighting. I see donation weighting as a weird halfway house between EA Funds and (threshold) Random Pooling. With donation-weighting you don’t get the hiring process or expertise of EA Funds, and you get way fewer of the benefits of randomisation than (threshold) Random Pooling.
The alternative I’m most sympathetic to (threshold random donor pooling in a cause-area) isn’t affected by your second and third points. The allocator wouldn’t be some rural-museums-obsessive, it would be a “typical well-informed EA”—and because its within a cause area we could be even more sure it won’t be spent on e.g. a rural museum. Threshold random donor pooling in a cause-area would expand the search space within global health, or within animal rights, etc. And finally, the threshold would prevent raids.
Hey thanks for the comment!
As mentioned, I’m offering a bunch of alternatives—not all of which I support—to help us examine our current system. ‘Reverse-donation-weighted’ in particular is more of a prompt to “why do we think donation-weighting is normal or unproblematic—what might we be missing out on or reinforcing with donation-weighting?”
Note that the current ‘donor lottery’ is a form of random donor pooling—but with donation-weighting. I see donation weighting as a weird halfway house between EA Funds and (threshold) Random Pooling. With donation-weighting you don’t get the hiring process or expertise of EA Funds, and you get way fewer of the benefits of randomisation than (threshold) Random Pooling.
The alternative I’m most sympathetic to (threshold random donor pooling in a cause-area) isn’t affected by your second and third points. The allocator wouldn’t be some rural-museums-obsessive, it would be a “typical well-informed EA”—and because its within a cause area we could be even more sure it won’t be spent on e.g. a rural museum. Threshold random donor pooling in a cause-area would expand the search space within global health, or within animal rights, etc. And finally, the threshold would prevent raids.