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’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”.