I still don’t understand this. The lottery means one / a small number of grantmakers get all the money to allocate. People who don’t win don’t need to think about where to donate. So really it seems to me that the lottery reduces the number of grantmakers and indeed the number of who spend time thinking about where to donate.
The model is this:
A bunch of people each have $5,000 to donate.
Many put in a bit of effort—they spend a bit of time on the GiveWell website, read some stuff by MIRI, and chat to a couple of friends. But this isn’t enough to catch them up on the state of the art, let alone make some novel contribution to the grant application discrimination project.
Others can’t find the time to do even this much research.
So overall very little grant evaluation has really been done, and what has been done is highly duplicative. Given they all fail to pass the bar of ‘as good as the EA funds’, this work was essentially wasted.
But if they instead did a lottery:
One person gets $500,000 to donate.
He now puts in a lot of effort—reading a huge amount of literature, and doing calls with the leaders of multiple organizations. Perhaps he also discusses his approaches with several other EAs for advice.
By the end he has a novel understanding of some aspect of the charitable funding landscape, which exceeds that of the EA fund grantmakers.
The overall amount of time spent is actually less than before, but the depth is far greater, and with dramatically less redundancy.
So by using the lottery we have both saved time and increased the amount of effective evaluation work being done.
I think deciding between capital allocators is a great use of the donor lottery, even as a Plan A. You might say something like: “I would probably give to the Long-Term Future Fund, but I’m not totally sure whether they’re better than the EA Infrastructure Fund or Longview or something I might come up with myself. So I’ll participate in the donor lottery so if I win, I can take more time to read their reports and see which of them seems best.” I think this would be a great decision.
I’d be pretty unhappy if such a donor then felt forced to instead do their own grantmaking despite not having a comparative advantage for doing so (possibly underperforming Open Phil’s last dollar), or didn’t participate in the donor lottery in the first place. I think the above use case is one of the most central one that I hope to address.
I tentatively agree that further diversification of funding sources might be good, but I don’t think the donor lottery is the right tool for that.
The model is this:
A bunch of people each have $5,000 to donate.
Many put in a bit of effort—they spend a bit of time on the GiveWell website, read some stuff by MIRI, and chat to a couple of friends. But this isn’t enough to catch them up on the state of the art, let alone make some novel contribution to the grant application discrimination project.
Others can’t find the time to do even this much research.
So overall very little grant evaluation has really been done, and what has been done is highly duplicative. Given they all fail to pass the bar of ‘as good as the EA funds’, this work was essentially wasted.
But if they instead did a lottery:
One person gets $500,000 to donate.
He now puts in a lot of effort—reading a huge amount of literature, and doing calls with the leaders of multiple organizations. Perhaps he also discusses his approaches with several other EAs for advice.
By the end he has a novel understanding of some aspect of the charitable funding landscape, which exceeds that of the EA fund grantmakers.
The overall amount of time spent is actually less than before, but the depth is far greater, and with dramatically less redundancy.
So by using the lottery we have both saved time and increased the amount of effective evaluation work being done.
Thanks, I understand all that. I was confused when Khorton said:
I wouldn’t say the lottery increases the number of grantmakers who have spent significant time thinking, I think it in fact reduces it.
I agree with you when you say however:
I think deciding between capital allocators is a great use of the donor lottery, even as a Plan A. You might say something like: “I would probably give to the Long-Term Future Fund, but I’m not totally sure whether they’re better than the EA Infrastructure Fund or Longview or something I might come up with myself. So I’ll participate in the donor lottery so if I win, I can take more time to read their reports and see which of them seems best.” I think this would be a great decision.
I’d be pretty unhappy if such a donor then felt forced to instead do their own grantmaking despite not having a comparative advantage for doing so (possibly underperforming Open Phil’s last dollar), or didn’t participate in the donor lottery in the first place. I think the above use case is one of the most central one that I hope to address.
I tentatively agree that further diversification of funding sources might be good, but I don’t think the donor lottery is the right tool for that.