I think your analysis of the alternatives is mostly from the perspective of “what will lead to optimal allocation of resources at the group level?”
But the strongest case for donor lotteries, in my view, isn’t in these terms at all. Rather, it’s that entering a lottery is often a dominant action from the perspective of the individual donor (if most other things they would consider giving to don’t exhibit noticeably diminishing returns over the amount they are attempting to get in the lottery). The winner of a lottery need not be the allocator for the money; they can instead e.g. decide to take longer thinking about whom they want to delegate allocation power to (I actually think this might often be the “technically correct” move; I don’t know how often lottery winners act this way). This dominance argument would go through for a much smaller proportion of possible donors for your alternatives. I’m interested if you see another reason that people would donate to these?
Thanks for your comment. I’m not entirely sure I understand what you mean by dominant action, so if you don’t mind saying more about that I’d appreciate it.
My confusion is something like: there’s no new money out there! Its a group of donors deciding to give individually or give collectively. So the perspective of “what will lead to optimal allocation of resources at the group level?” is the right one. Even if people are taking individual actions comparing ‘donate to x directly’ or ‘donate to a lottery, then to x’, those individual decision create a collective institution, for which the question of group optimality is relevant. Also, the EA community (+CEA) is not just endorsing this system, its providing a lot of logistical support. So the question of what its effects are and how we should be structuring it are key ones.
On another note, I don’t know enough about game theory to phrase this intuition correctly, but something seems off about the suggestion that its dominant for each of the donors. E.g. if there are 10 donors in a pool, only one of them is going to be selected. They can’t all ‘win’. Feels a bit like defect being dominant in a prisoner’s dilemma. But again, could be misunderstanding.
My understanding is that past people selected to allocate the pool haven’t tended to delegate that allocation power. And indeed if you’re strongly expecting to do so, why not just give the allocation power to that person beforehand, either over your individual donation (e.g. through an EA fund) or over a pool. Why go through the lottery stage?
By dominant action I mean “is ~at least as good as other actions on ~every dimension, and better on at least one dimension”.
My confusion is something like: there’s no new money out there! Its a group of donors deciding to give individually or give collectively. So the perspective of “what will lead to optimal allocation of resources at the group level?” is the right one.
I don’t think donor lotteries are primarily about collective giving. As a donor lottery entrant, I’d be just as happy giving $5k for a 5% chance of controlling a $100k pot of pooled winnings as entering a regular lottery where I could give $5k for a 5% chance of winning $100k (which I would then donate)*. In either case I think I’ll do more than 20x as much good with $100k than $5k (mostly since I can spend longer thinking and investigating), so it’s worthwhile in expectation.
* Except that I usually don’t have good access to that kind of lottery (maybe there would also be tax implications, although perhaps it’s fine if the money is all being donated). So the other donors are a logistical convenience, but not an integral part of the idea.
My understanding is that past people selected to allocate the pool haven’t tended to delegate that allocation power. And indeed if you’re strongly expecting to do so, why not just give the allocation power to that person beforehand, either over your individual donation (e.g. through an EA fund) or over a pool. Why go through the lottery stage?
I don’t know that they should strongly expect to do so. But in any case the reason for going through the lottery stage is simple: maybe you’d want to take 50 hours thinking about whether to delegate and to whom, and vetting possible people to delegate to. That time might not be worth spending for a $5k donation, but become worth spending for a $100k donation. (Additionally the person you want to delegate to might be more likely to take the duty seriously for a larger amount of money.)
I’m sure you would be just as happy entering a regular lottery—you’re one of the few people that could approach the ideal I mentioned of the “perfect rational maximising Homo economicus”!
For us lesser mortals though, there are two reasons we might be queasy about entering a regular lottery. First if we’re cautious/risk-sensitive—if we have a bias towards our donations being likely to do good. We might not feel comfortable being risk-neutral and just doing the expected value calculation. Second, if we’re impatient/time-sensitive—for example if we believe there’s a particular window for donations open now that would not be open if we waited several years to win the lottery.
That’s about approaching it as a regular lottery. But again I really don’t think we should be approaching these systems as matters just for individual donors. We’ve moved so far away from the “just maximise the impact of your own particular donation” perspective in other parts of EA! Its not just a matter for individuals—we as a community, through institutions like CEA, are supporting (logistically and through approval/sanction) some particular donor pooling systems and not others. It’s worth considering what dynamics we could be reinforcing, whether alternatives might be better.
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On the benefits of pooling, I quite agree about the time:donation size ratio.
As I said: “Donor pooling has several advantages. First, it saves everyone’s time. There are also gains from specialisation – 1 allocator spending 50 hours researching the best opportunity will likely produce better results than 50 donors spending 1 hour. Second, there are opportunities that are only available to an allocator with a large pool. Charities are more willing to provide information and spend time on discussions.”
If you’ve got a $5k donation, its not worth spending as much time on—so maybe you should just donate to a donor pool is in a pool with a predetermined allocator(s) e.g. the EA Funds. If you’ve pooled your donations with others and have $100k, it is worth spending more time on the allocator and allocation decision. But then why not 1) have an internal discussion/consensus/vote on who should be allocator or 2) randomise who gets to take the “delegate or allocate” decision? Why adopt this weird halfway house where people who have donated more to the pot have a greater chance of being selected—thereby sacrificing many of the benefits of discussion on the one hand, or randomisation on the other?
I guess I wouldn’t recommend the donor lottery to people who wouldn’t be happy entering a regular lottery for their charitable giving (but I would usually recommend them to be happy with that regular lottery!).
Btw, I’m now understanding your suggestions as not really alternatives to the donor lottery, since I don’t think you buy into its premises, but alternatives to e.g. EA Funds.
(In support of the premise of respecting individual autonomy about where to allocate money: I think that making requests to pool money in a way that rich donors expect to lose control would risk making EA pattern match at a surface level to a scam, and might drive people away. For a more extreme version of this, imagine someone claiming that as soon as you’ve decided to donate some money you should send it all to the One True EA Collective fund, so that it can be fairly distributed, and it would be a weird propagation of wealth to allow rich people to take any time to think about where to give their money; whether or not you think an optimal taxation system would equalise wealth much more, I think it’s fairly clear that the extreme bid that everyone pool donations would be destructive because it would put off donors.
I guess I wouldn’t recommend the donor lottery to people who wouldn’t be happy entering a regular lottery for their charitable giving
Strong +1.
If I won a donor lottery, I would consider myself to have no obligation whatsoever towards the other lottery participants, and I think many other lottery participants feel the same way. So it’s potentially quite bad if some participants are thinking of me as an “allocator” of their money. To the extent there is ambiguity in the current setup, it seems important to try to eliminate that.
Interesting! I would feel I had been quasirandomly selected to allocate our shared pool of donations—and would definitely feel some obligation/responsibility.
As evidence that other people feel the same way, I would point to the extensive research and write-ups that previously selected allocators have done. A key explanation for why they’ve done that is a sense of obligation/responsibility for the group.
I don’t think the research is much evidence here. The whole point of the donor lottery is that the winner can justify doing a lot more research. This would be the case even if they hated the other entrants.
You’re right that they wouldn’t necessarily have to share that research, but many people enjoy posting on the forum anyway. Previously Jonas has been at pains to clarify that such reports are not required.
Your policy seems reasonable. Although I wonder if the analogy with a regular lottery might risk confusing people. When one thinks of “entering a regular lottery for charitable giving”, one might think of additional money—money that counterfactually wouldn’t have gone to charity. But that’s not true of donor lotteries—there is no additional money.
On your second point: “making requests to pool money in a way that rich donors expect to lose control” describes the EA Funds, which I don’t think are a scam. In fact, the EA funds pool money in such a way that donors are certain to lose control.
I disagree with the implication that so few people are interested in the dominance consideration. At least among my social network, both EA and not, people are really interested in the donor lottery, and I present it in that framing. The idea of trying to maximize one’s impact with one’s donation is inherently a bit against people’s natural instincts, but somehow EA has taken off anyway.
That aside however, I really like some of the ideas here, and wouldn’t be surprised if there were something compelling in between “random lottery” and “static fund managers”.
I think your analysis of the alternatives is mostly from the perspective of “what will lead to optimal allocation of resources at the group level?”
But the strongest case for donor lotteries, in my view, isn’t in these terms at all. Rather, it’s that entering a lottery is often a dominant action from the perspective of the individual donor (if most other things they would consider giving to don’t exhibit noticeably diminishing returns over the amount they are attempting to get in the lottery). The winner of a lottery need not be the allocator for the money; they can instead e.g. decide to take longer thinking about whom they want to delegate allocation power to (I actually think this might often be the “technically correct” move; I don’t know how often lottery winners act this way). This dominance argument would go through for a much smaller proportion of possible donors for your alternatives. I’m interested if you see another reason that people would donate to these?
Thanks for your comment. I’m not entirely sure I understand what you mean by dominant action, so if you don’t mind saying more about that I’d appreciate it.
My confusion is something like: there’s no new money out there! Its a group of donors deciding to give individually or give collectively. So the perspective of “what will lead to optimal allocation of resources at the group level?” is the right one. Even if people are taking individual actions comparing ‘donate to x directly’ or ‘donate to a lottery, then to x’, those individual decision create a collective institution, for which the question of group optimality is relevant. Also, the EA community (+CEA) is not just endorsing this system, its providing a lot of logistical support. So the question of what its effects are and how we should be structuring it are key ones.
On another note, I don’t know enough about game theory to phrase this intuition correctly, but something seems off about the suggestion that its dominant for each of the donors. E.g. if there are 10 donors in a pool, only one of them is going to be selected. They can’t all ‘win’. Feels a bit like defect being dominant in a prisoner’s dilemma. But again, could be misunderstanding.
My understanding is that past people selected to allocate the pool haven’t tended to delegate that allocation power. And indeed if you’re strongly expecting to do so, why not just give the allocation power to that person beforehand, either over your individual donation (e.g. through an EA fund) or over a pool. Why go through the lottery stage?
By dominant action I mean “is ~at least as good as other actions on ~every dimension, and better on at least one dimension”.
I don’t think donor lotteries are primarily about collective giving. As a donor lottery entrant, I’d be just as happy giving $5k for a 5% chance of controlling a $100k pot of pooled winnings as entering a regular lottery where I could give $5k for a 5% chance of winning $100k (which I would then donate)*. In either case I think I’ll do more than 20x as much good with $100k than $5k (mostly since I can spend longer thinking and investigating), so it’s worthwhile in expectation.
* Except that I usually don’t have good access to that kind of lottery (maybe there would also be tax implications, although perhaps it’s fine if the money is all being donated). So the other donors are a logistical convenience, but not an integral part of the idea.
I don’t know that they should strongly expect to do so. But in any case the reason for going through the lottery stage is simple: maybe you’d want to take 50 hours thinking about whether to delegate and to whom, and vetting possible people to delegate to. That time might not be worth spending for a $5k donation, but become worth spending for a $100k donation. (Additionally the person you want to delegate to might be more likely to take the duty seriously for a larger amount of money.)
I’m sure you would be just as happy entering a regular lottery—you’re one of the few people that could approach the ideal I mentioned of the “perfect rational maximising Homo economicus”!
For us lesser mortals though, there are two reasons we might be queasy about entering a regular lottery. First if we’re cautious/risk-sensitive—if we have a bias towards our donations being likely to do good. We might not feel comfortable being risk-neutral and just doing the expected value calculation. Second, if we’re impatient/time-sensitive—for example if we believe there’s a particular window for donations open now that would not be open if we waited several years to win the lottery.
That’s about approaching it as a regular lottery. But again I really don’t think we should be approaching these systems as matters just for individual donors. We’ve moved so far away from the “just maximise the impact of your own particular donation” perspective in other parts of EA! Its not just a matter for individuals—we as a community, through institutions like CEA, are supporting (logistically and through approval/sanction) some particular donor pooling systems and not others. It’s worth considering what dynamics we could be reinforcing, whether alternatives might be better.
-
On the benefits of pooling, I quite agree about the time:donation size ratio.
As I said: “Donor pooling has several advantages. First, it saves everyone’s time. There are also gains from specialisation – 1 allocator spending 50 hours researching the best opportunity will likely produce better results than 50 donors spending 1 hour. Second, there are opportunities that are only available to an allocator with a large pool. Charities are more willing to provide information and spend time on discussions.”
If you’ve got a $5k donation, its not worth spending as much time on—so maybe you should just donate to a donor pool is in a pool with a predetermined allocator(s) e.g. the EA Funds. If you’ve pooled your donations with others and have $100k, it is worth spending more time on the allocator and allocation decision. But then why not 1) have an internal discussion/consensus/vote on who should be allocator or 2) randomise who gets to take the “delegate or allocate” decision? Why adopt this weird halfway house where people who have donated more to the pot have a greater chance of being selected—thereby sacrificing many of the benefits of discussion on the one hand, or randomisation on the other?
I guess I wouldn’t recommend the donor lottery to people who wouldn’t be happy entering a regular lottery for their charitable giving (but I would usually recommend them to be happy with that regular lottery!).
Btw, I’m now understanding your suggestions as not really alternatives to the donor lottery, since I don’t think you buy into its premises, but alternatives to e.g. EA Funds.
(In support of the premise of respecting individual autonomy about where to allocate money: I think that making requests to pool money in a way that rich donors expect to lose control would risk making EA pattern match at a surface level to a scam, and might drive people away. For a more extreme version of this, imagine someone claiming that as soon as you’ve decided to donate some money you should send it all to the One True EA Collective fund, so that it can be fairly distributed, and it would be a weird propagation of wealth to allow rich people to take any time to think about where to give their money; whether or not you think an optimal taxation system would equalise wealth much more, I think it’s fairly clear that the extreme bid that everyone pool donations would be destructive because it would put off donors.
Strong +1.
If I won a donor lottery, I would consider myself to have no obligation whatsoever towards the other lottery participants, and I think many other lottery participants feel the same way. So it’s potentially quite bad if some participants are thinking of me as an “allocator” of their money. To the extent there is ambiguity in the current setup, it seems important to try to eliminate that.
Interesting! I would feel I had been quasirandomly selected to allocate our shared pool of donations—and would definitely feel some obligation/responsibility.
As evidence that other people feel the same way, I would point to the extensive research and write-ups that previously selected allocators have done. A key explanation for why they’ve done that is a sense of obligation/responsibility for the group.
I don’t think the research is much evidence here. The whole point of the donor lottery is that the winner can justify doing a lot more research. This would be the case even if they hated the other entrants.
You’re right that they wouldn’t necessarily have to share that research, but many people enjoy posting on the forum anyway. Previously Jonas has been at pains to clarify that such reports are not required.
Your policy seems reasonable. Although I wonder if the analogy with a regular lottery might risk confusing people. When one thinks of “entering a regular lottery for charitable giving”, one might think of additional money—money that counterfactually wouldn’t have gone to charity. But that’s not true of donor lotteries—there is no additional money.
On your second point: “making requests to pool money in a way that rich donors expect to lose control” describes the EA Funds, which I don’t think are a scam. In fact, the EA funds pool money in such a way that donors are certain to lose control.
I disagree with the implication that so few people are interested in the dominance consideration. At least among my social network, both EA and not, people are really interested in the donor lottery, and I present it in that framing. The idea of trying to maximize one’s impact with one’s donation is inherently a bit against people’s natural instincts, but somehow EA has taken off anyway.
That aside however, I really like some of the ideas here, and wouldn’t be surprised if there were something compelling in between “random lottery” and “static fund managers”.