I agree that democratizing funding is easier for GWH causes than for more longtermist ones, and there is correspondingly more precedent for this in global health. I’m not going to do a lit review, but Tables 3 and 4 here list some of the things that have been tried (though I wouldn’t read the paper). Personally, I think the move is probably to survey potential beneficiaries—rather than doing something more deliberative—and then factor their preferences/values into decisions about which projects within a given cause area to prioritize (rather than having them choose causes). The case is trickier for longtermist causes—both normatively and practically—but Will MacAskill and Tyler John’s WaPo op-ed touches on some creative ways of doing this.
But my point is really: EA has developed some excellent, remarkably creative solutions to other problems in priority setting. My sense is that when GiveWell was started, the perception of many people in global health was that it would be impossible to do what they were trying to do. Open Philanthropy has also developed some innovative approaches to priority setting, and seems to do a great job of implementing them.
When we look at efforts by many non-EA organizations to allocate funding democratically, the track record does not look good (to me). But the EA community has solved other, likely far more challenging priority-setting problems, so I think it’d be a mistake to say “this is impossible to do well” without seriously interrogating all of the options.
Sure! A couple of thoughts:
I agree that democratizing funding is easier for GWH causes than for more longtermist ones, and there is correspondingly more precedent for this in global health. I’m not going to do a lit review, but Tables 3 and 4 here list some of the things that have been tried (though I wouldn’t read the paper). Personally, I think the move is probably to survey potential beneficiaries—rather than doing something more deliberative—and then factor their preferences/values into decisions about which projects within a given cause area to prioritize (rather than having them choose causes). The case is trickier for longtermist causes—both normatively and practically—but Will MacAskill and Tyler John’s WaPo op-ed touches on some creative ways of doing this.
But my point is really: EA has developed some excellent, remarkably creative solutions to other problems in priority setting. My sense is that when GiveWell was started, the perception of many people in global health was that it would be impossible to do what they were trying to do. Open Philanthropy has also developed some innovative approaches to priority setting, and seems to do a great job of implementing them.
When we look at efforts by many non-EA organizations to allocate funding democratically, the track record does not look good (to me). But the EA community has solved other, likely far more challenging priority-setting problems, so I think it’d be a mistake to say “this is impossible to do well” without seriously interrogating all of the options.