At the moment we offer several options for donors who wish to take advantage of more research than they can justify doing themselves:
EA Funds, where they money will be allocated basically on semi-professional allocators who have been chosen (ideally) for their knowledge and competence.
Donor lotteries, where the expected money you donate is conserved, but your counterfactual research time is concentrated.
Give Directly, to give power to the poorest people in the world and take advantage of their local knowledge of their needs and opportunities.
Many of your suggestions seems essentially like a mixture of these three, but without really the advantages of either. For example, Random Donor Pooling (2) or Reverse-Donation-Weighted is basically like the EA funds except with a less rigourous hiring procedure. Unless you think the EA Funds search for qualified candidates adds negative value I’m not sure why this would be desirable. Alternatively, it’s basically like the donor lottery, except it punishes you for donating larger amounts of money; I don’t think many people would want to donate more than the minimum if it means reducing their expected influence in favour of not-obviously-more-qualified people. Or it’s like GiveDirectly, except you’re empowering smaller donors who are still relatively quite well off. Taken all together, I’m not sure why someone would prefer one of these alternatively-weighted lotteries over some combination of these already-existing options.
I also disagree with your suggestion that biasing donor lotteries towards smaller donors would necessarily widen the search space:
Randomness expands the search space by increasing the chances of people not typically selected to allocate large pots of money
The search space covers the various possibilities that you are examining. For a typical well-informed EA this might include a few dozen charities in global health, animal rights and existential risk reduction. If we select some unusual person, who spends all their time researching charities to promote local museums in rural Ireland, this doesn’t really expand our search space unless that person also researchers the standard charities in as much as depth as a typical EA donor would. Otherwise we’ve just replaced it with a different search space, one I suspect most EAs would consider inferior.
Worse, it seems quite plausible that if EAs donated a lot of money to a pot whose direction would be determined on a per-capita basis (rather than proportionally) that some other community would decide to ‘raid’ it by having a lot of people donate the minimum amount and then divert the money to their own ends.
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.
At the moment we offer several options for donors who wish to take advantage of more research than they can justify doing themselves:
EA Funds, where they money will be allocated basically on semi-professional allocators who have been chosen (ideally) for their knowledge and competence.
Donor lotteries, where the expected money you donate is conserved, but your counterfactual research time is concentrated.
Give Directly, to give power to the poorest people in the world and take advantage of their local knowledge of their needs and opportunities.
Many of your suggestions seems essentially like a mixture of these three, but without really the advantages of either. For example, Random Donor Pooling (2) or Reverse-Donation-Weighted is basically like the EA funds except with a less rigourous hiring procedure. Unless you think the EA Funds search for qualified candidates adds negative value I’m not sure why this would be desirable. Alternatively, it’s basically like the donor lottery, except it punishes you for donating larger amounts of money; I don’t think many people would want to donate more than the minimum if it means reducing their expected influence in favour of not-obviously-more-qualified people. Or it’s like GiveDirectly, except you’re empowering smaller donors who are still relatively quite well off. Taken all together, I’m not sure why someone would prefer one of these alternatively-weighted lotteries over some combination of these already-existing options.
I also disagree with your suggestion that biasing donor lotteries towards smaller donors would necessarily widen the search space:
The search space covers the various possibilities that you are examining. For a typical well-informed EA this might include a few dozen charities in global health, animal rights and existential risk reduction. If we select some unusual person, who spends all their time researching charities to promote local museums in rural Ireland, this doesn’t really expand our search space unless that person also researchers the standard charities in as much as depth as a typical EA donor would. Otherwise we’ve just replaced it with a different search space, one I suspect most EAs would consider inferior.
Worse, it seems quite plausible that if EAs donated a lot of money to a pot whose direction would be determined on a per-capita basis (rather than proportionally) that some other community would decide to ‘raid’ it by having a lot of people donate the minimum amount and then divert the money to their own ends.
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.