From where I’m coming from, having seen bits of many sides of this issue, I think average quality matters more than average quantity.
Traits of mediocre donors (including “good” donors with few resources): - Don’t hunt for great opportunities - High amounts of noise/randomness in results - Be strongly overconfident in some weird ways - Have poor resolution, meaning they will not be able to choose targets much better than light common sense wisdom - Difficult, time consuming, and opaque to work with - Not very easy to understand, or not predictable
If one particular person not liking your for an arbitrary reason (uncorrelated overconfidence) stops you from getting funding, that would be the sign of a mediocre donor.
If we had a bunch of these donors, the chances would go up for some nonprofits. Different nonprofits could be overconfident in different ways, leading to more groups being over or below different bars. Some bad nonprofits would be happy, because the noise could increase their chances of getting funding. But I think this is a pretty mediocre world overall.
Of course, one could argue that a given particular donor base isn’t that good, so more competition is likely to result in better donors. I think competition can be quite healthy and result in improvements in quality. So, more organizations can be good, but for different reasons, and only so much as they result in better quality.
Similar to Jonas, I’d like to see more great donors join the fray, both by joining the existing organizations and helping them, and by making some new large funds.
From where I’m coming from, having seen bits of many sides of this issue, I think average quality matters more than average quantity.
Traits of mediocre donors (including “good” donors with few resources):
- Don’t hunt for great opportunities
- High amounts of noise/randomness in results
- Be strongly overconfident in some weird ways
- Have poor resolution, meaning they will not be able to choose targets much better than light common sense wisdom
- Difficult, time consuming, and opaque to work with
- Not very easy to understand, or not predictable
If one particular person not liking your for an arbitrary reason (uncorrelated overconfidence) stops you from getting funding, that would be the sign of a mediocre donor.
If we had a bunch of these donors, the chances would go up for some nonprofits. Different nonprofits could be overconfident in different ways, leading to more groups being over or below different bars. Some bad nonprofits would be happy, because the noise could increase their chances of getting funding. But I think this is a pretty mediocre world overall.
Of course, one could argue that a given particular donor base isn’t that good, so more competition is likely to result in better donors. I think competition can be quite healthy and result in improvements in quality. So, more organizations can be good, but for different reasons, and only so much as they result in better quality.
Similar to Jonas, I’d like to see more great donors join the fray, both by joining the existing organizations and helping them, and by making some new large funds.