I think it’s important to separate out the critical design features from the specific instantiation—this is a six-month prototype that can run on $0 with a reasonable amount of a single person’s volunteer labor. Like most no-budget volunteer efforts, it is likely going to be a bit clunky (e.g., “filling in donation forms every month for very small amounts of money”). Having a 501(c)(3) efficiently distribute out the money in a centralized manner would be ideal; it would also take a good bit of time and money to set up. It makes sense to run the clunky prototype first, get some of the bugs out, and then seek commitments of time and money to set up a more efficient infrastructure if the trials are promising enough.
What all of these have in common is they attempt to directly access the information people have, rather than just introducing it in a dilute form into a global average.
How effectively does it succeed in incorporating and weighing all that information, though? As an intuition pump, if the current system perfectly did so, it shouldn’t matter who which Donor was the million-dollar donor and which were small-dollar donors.
The traditional approach can take a single expert with very unusual knowledge and give them major influence over large donors; your approach gives this expert no more influence than any other person.
This, of course, requires the large donor(s) to recognize the expert’s expertise. Likewise, all of your examples rely on Donor 1 picking the right person to be persuaded by, to hire as a consultant, etc.
Rather, voters elect politicians, who then choose where the money is spent. Ideally voters choose good politicians, and these politicians consult good experts.
But they don’t pick generically “good” politicians—they pick ones who line up with their preferences on some big-picture questions (which can be seen as analogous to cause prio within cause areas here, or maybe even more specific than that). In this way, the preferences of the wealthy taxpayer (theoretically) don’t get more weight than those of the pauper in the politician’s decisions, and then the details get worked out by technocrats.
Of course, an outfit like EA Funds could do something like this if desired—monies flowing into a Democratic Allocation Fund could be distributed amongst the existing cause-area funds based on some sort of democratic allocation algorithm.
There are many factors which are correlated both with having money money and having accurate views about the world, because they help with both [ . . .]
I don’t think zero (or even particularly low) correlation is necessary for this project to make sense.
If one were shown 5,000 people in a crowd and were required to make a personally important decision based on their judgment about the world while knowing nothing other than their income/wealth, I submit that the optimal decision rule would be neither (a) weight all 5,000 views evenly, or (b) give predominant weight to the very richest people in the bunch, and very little to the bottom 80% (or whatever). But: if I know that a determination had already been made to make the bulk of the decision using rule (b), it would often make sense to use rule (a) on the margin that I could control.
In addition to questioning how strong the (money:good cause prio) correlation is, I am pretty confident it is not remotely linear. Suppose we somehow knew that it made sense to give five times the weight to the views of someone who made $250K/year than someone who made $50K/year (which is already doubtful to me). I would expect a much more modest ideal weighting between $250K and $1.25MM, and an even more modest ideal weighting between $1.25MM and $6.25MM, etc. Yet the current system gives greater prominence to the higher intervals (in absolute terms).
Finally, donation decisions can be significantly driven by donors’ somewhat idiosyncratic preferences—cf. Good Ventures’ recent decision to stop funding various subcauses for reasons unrelated to any determination it made about those subcauses’ effectiveness. Those preferences may well be anti-correlated with effectiveness insofar as highly neglected causes may pose more PR headaches. Not having their own private foundations, smaller donors can donate as they honestly see best without having to face the risk of external PR backlash. Even if idiosyncratic preferences were no more prevalent among the wealthy, it is probably better to dilute them rather than have so much riding on those of the top few people.
I think it’s important to separate out the critical design features from the specific instantiation—this is a six-month prototype that can run on $0 with a reasonable amount of a single person’s volunteer labor. Like most no-budget volunteer efforts, it is likely going to be a bit clunky (e.g., “filling in donation forms every month for very small amounts of money”). Having a 501(c)(3) efficiently distribute out the money in a centralized manner would be ideal; it would also take a good bit of time and money to set up. It makes sense to run the clunky prototype first, get some of the bugs out, and then seek commitments of time and money to set up a more efficient infrastructure if the trials are promising enough.
How effectively does it succeed in incorporating and weighing all that information, though? As an intuition pump, if the current system perfectly did so, it shouldn’t matter who which Donor was the million-dollar donor and which were small-dollar donors.
This, of course, requires the large donor(s) to recognize the expert’s expertise. Likewise, all of your examples rely on Donor 1 picking the right person to be persuaded by, to hire as a consultant, etc.
But they don’t pick generically “good” politicians—they pick ones who line up with their preferences on some big-picture questions (which can be seen as analogous to cause prio within cause areas here, or maybe even more specific than that). In this way, the preferences of the wealthy taxpayer (theoretically) don’t get more weight than those of the pauper in the politician’s decisions, and then the details get worked out by technocrats.
Of course, an outfit like EA Funds could do something like this if desired—monies flowing into a Democratic Allocation Fund could be distributed amongst the existing cause-area funds based on some sort of democratic allocation algorithm.
I don’t think zero (or even particularly low) correlation is necessary for this project to make sense.
If one were shown 5,000 people in a crowd and were required to make a personally important decision based on their judgment about the world while knowing nothing other than their income/wealth, I submit that the optimal decision rule would be neither (a) weight all 5,000 views evenly, or (b) give predominant weight to the very richest people in the bunch, and very little to the bottom 80% (or whatever). But: if I know that a determination had already been made to make the bulk of the decision using rule (b), it would often make sense to use rule (a) on the margin that I could control.
In addition to questioning how strong the (money:good cause prio) correlation is, I am pretty confident it is not remotely linear. Suppose we somehow knew that it made sense to give five times the weight to the views of someone who made $250K/year than someone who made $50K/year (which is already doubtful to me). I would expect a much more modest ideal weighting between $250K and $1.25MM, and an even more modest ideal weighting between $1.25MM and $6.25MM, etc. Yet the current system gives greater prominence to the higher intervals (in absolute terms).
Finally, donation decisions can be significantly driven by donors’ somewhat idiosyncratic preferences—cf. Good Ventures’ recent decision to stop funding various subcauses for reasons unrelated to any determination it made about those subcauses’ effectiveness. Those preferences may well be anti-correlated with effectiveness insofar as highly neglected causes may pose more PR headaches. Not having their own private foundations, smaller donors can donate as they honestly see best without having to face the risk of external PR backlash. Even if idiosyncratic preferences were no more prevalent among the wealthy, it is probably better to dilute them rather than have so much riding on those of the top few people.