As someone who participated in the discussion I am satisfied with the outcome. In particular, I like that peoples votes still count with equal weight if their favourite charity gets eliminated.
A suggestion to supplement the voting system: The proposed voting system is compatible with ranked-choice voting. Maybe you can offer voters the option to give their vote in the form of ranking, without putting in lots of points. When calculating point totals, this would give all points of the voter to the highest-ranked charity on this voters ballot that has not been eliminated yet (within the current system, this effect can be approximated by giving 90% of points to my first choice, 9% to second, 0.9% to third, and so on).
Why? This could be a simpler way to vote for some people, and its fully compatible with the existing system. Also, the share of each voter corresponds to a few dollars, and at those scales, some EAs might think that all their share should go to the charity they consider to be the best, and not split up among multiple charities (this would correspond to giving all your points to that charity, but under the current system you should also spare some points in case your favourite charitiy gets eliminated).
Also, what is the point limit per voter? Maybe you dont need a limit at all, since you normalize the points anyways to give every voter equal weight...
This is a good idea, thanks! (I’m not sure if we’ll use it, but I expect Agnes or someone else will check what’s confusing to people and might try this as an alternative.) Although I think the ranked-choice approximation would involve larger ratios (but I’m not sure). (We might also add a tool that lets people compare pairs of charities to produce a draft allocation of points, which might be easier for some people to work with.)
We aren’t planning on having a point limit. We might display the sum of points someone’s distributed on the point-allocation page, in case that’s useful for them to check as they’re allocating points. But we’ll normalize points ourselves.
As someone who participated in the discussion I am satisfied with the outcome. In particular, I like that peoples votes still count with equal weight if their favourite charity gets eliminated.
A suggestion to supplement the voting system: The proposed voting system is compatible with ranked-choice voting. Maybe you can offer voters the option to give their vote in the form of ranking, without putting in lots of points. When calculating point totals, this would give all points of the voter to the highest-ranked charity on this voters ballot that has not been eliminated yet (within the current system, this effect can be approximated by giving 90% of points to my first choice, 9% to second, 0.9% to third, and so on).
Why? This could be a simpler way to vote for some people, and its fully compatible with the existing system. Also, the share of each voter corresponds to a few dollars, and at those scales, some EAs might think that all their share should go to the charity they consider to be the best, and not split up among multiple charities (this would correspond to giving all your points to that charity, but under the current system you should also spare some points in case your favourite charitiy gets eliminated).
Also, what is the point limit per voter? Maybe you dont need a limit at all, since you normalize the points anyways to give every voter equal weight...
This is a good idea, thanks! (I’m not sure if we’ll use it, but I expect Agnes or someone else will check what’s confusing to people and might try this as an alternative.) Although I think the ranked-choice approximation would involve larger ratios (but I’m not sure). (We might also add a tool that lets people compare pairs of charities to produce a draft allocation of points, which might be easier for some people to work with.)
We aren’t planning on having a point limit. We might display the sum of points someone’s distributed on the point-allocation page, in case that’s useful for them to check as they’re allocating points. But we’ll normalize points ourselves.