This post is excellent. Overall, this reminds me of Bryan Caplan’s comment on Radical Markets that it proposes ingenious solutions to non-existent problems. I have some supplementary comments.
I would make one of the drawbacks that most use cases do not actually involve satisfaction of aggregate rational selfish preferences; in a slogan, democracy is not social choice. You mention this in the ‘revisiting potential applications’ section, but I think it should be classed as a drawback on its own. Charitable donors, grantmakers and public good providers are not trying to satisfy their selfish rational preferences, but rather aiming to act altruistically often with irrational or mistaken beliefs about how to make the world better.
The empirical literature on voting suggests that voters are neither selfish nor rational. Voters vote on the basis of what they believe to be the public interest, but are often badly ill-informed and irrational. Surveys from 2015 found that over one third of Republicans wanted to bomb Aladdin’s homeland of Aghrab, while 44% of Democrats wanted to let in refugees from the same fictional country. This is not a rational selfish preference, but an irrational beliefs about what would be good in the world. The interesting thing about modern liberal democracies is how they do so well despite the political ignorance and irrationality of altruistic voters, not how they aggregate rational informed selfish preferences.
Similarly, as you note, grantmakers and donors are not expressing selfish preferences about pots of money, but rather acting on beliefs about how money should be spent to make the world better. The rationale for QF does not work in this context. The challenge of good grantmaking is to get people to make good altruistic decisions using multiple sources of information efficiently.
Thanks for the comment, John! I agree with your point about preference aggregation as a main drawback, and I wish that EAs would appreciate this point more. The reason why I chose not to make it a drawback is because this criticism applies to most of the public goods provision literature, as opposed to applying specifically in the case of QF. But hopefully my points in the discussion about potential applications and your comment will bring more attention to this issue.
This post is excellent. Overall, this reminds me of Bryan Caplan’s comment on Radical Markets that it proposes ingenious solutions to non-existent problems. I have some supplementary comments.
I would make one of the drawbacks that most use cases do not actually involve satisfaction of aggregate rational selfish preferences; in a slogan, democracy is not social choice. You mention this in the ‘revisiting potential applications’ section, but I think it should be classed as a drawback on its own. Charitable donors, grantmakers and public good providers are not trying to satisfy their selfish rational preferences, but rather aiming to act altruistically often with irrational or mistaken beliefs about how to make the world better.
The empirical literature on voting suggests that voters are neither selfish nor rational. Voters vote on the basis of what they believe to be the public interest, but are often badly ill-informed and irrational. Surveys from 2015 found that over one third of Republicans wanted to bomb Aladdin’s homeland of Aghrab, while 44% of Democrats wanted to let in refugees from the same fictional country. This is not a rational selfish preference, but an irrational beliefs about what would be good in the world. The interesting thing about modern liberal democracies is how they do so well despite the political ignorance and irrationality of altruistic voters, not how they aggregate rational informed selfish preferences.
Similarly, as you note, grantmakers and donors are not expressing selfish preferences about pots of money, but rather acting on beliefs about how money should be spent to make the world better. The rationale for QF does not work in this context. The challenge of good grantmaking is to get people to make good altruistic decisions using multiple sources of information efficiently.
Thanks for the comment, John! I agree with your point about preference aggregation as a main drawback, and I wish that EAs would appreciate this point more. The reason why I chose not to make it a drawback is because this criticism applies to most of the public goods provision literature, as opposed to applying specifically in the case of QF. But hopefully my points in the discussion about potential applications and your comment will bring more attention to this issue.