One potential weakness is that I’m curious if it promotes the more well-known charities due to the voting system. I’d assume that these are somewhat inversely correlated with the most neglected charities.
Related, I’m curious if future versions could feature specific subprojects/teams within charities. “Rethink Priorities” is a rather large project compared to “PauseAI US”, I assume it would be interesting if different parts of it were put here instead.
(That said, in terms of the donation, I’d hope that we could donate to RP as a whole and trust RP to allocate it accordingly, instead of formally restricting the money, which can be quite a hassle in terms of accounting)
One potential weakness is that I’m curious if it promotes the more well-known charities due to the voting system. I’d assume that these are somewhat inversely correlated with the most neglected charities.
I guess this isn’t necessarily a weakness if the more well-known charities are more effective? I can see the case that: a) they might not be neglected in EA circles, but may be very neglected globally compared to their impact and that b) there is often an inverse relationship between tractability/neglectedness and importance/impact of a cause area and charity. Not saying you’re wrong, but it’s not necessarily a problem.
Furthermore, my anecdotal take from the voting patterns as well as the comments on the discussion thread seem to indicate that neglectedness is often high on the mind of voters—though I admit that commenters on that thread are a biased sample of all those voting in the election.
It can be a bit underwhelming if an experiment to try to get the crowd’s takes on charities winds up determining to, “just let the current few experts figure it out.”
Is it underwhelming? I guess if you want the donation election to be about spurring lots of donations to small, spunky EA-startups working in weird-er cause areas, it might be, but I don’t think that’s what I understand the intention of the experiment to be (though I could be wrong).
My take is that the election is an experiment with EA democratisation, where we get to see what the community values when we do a roughly 1-person-1-ballot system instead of those-with-the-moeny decide system which is how things work right now. Those takeaways seem to be:
The broad EA community values Animal Welfare a lot more than the current major funders
The broad EA community sees value in all 3 of the ‘big cause areas’ with high-scoring charities in Animal Welfare, AI Safety, and Global Health & Development.
I (with limited information) think the EA Animal Welfare Fund is promising, but wonder how much of that matches the intention of this experiment. It can be a bit underwhelming if an experiment to try to get the crowd’s takes on charities winds up determining to, “just let the current few experts figure it out.” Though I guess, that does represent a good state of the world. (The public thinks that the current experts are basically right)
I think I broadly like the idea of Donation Week.
One potential weakness is that I’m curious if it promotes the more well-known charities due to the voting system. I’d assume that these are somewhat inversely correlated with the most neglected charities.
Related, I’m curious if future versions could feature specific subprojects/teams within charities. “Rethink Priorities” is a rather large project compared to “PauseAI US”, I assume it would be interesting if different parts of it were put here instead.
(That said, in terms of the donation, I’d hope that we could donate to RP as a whole and trust RP to allocate it accordingly, instead of formally restricting the money, which can be quite a hassle in terms of accounting)
I guess this isn’t necessarily a weakness if the more well-known charities are more effective? I can see the case that: a) they might not be neglected in EA circles, but may be very neglected globally compared to their impact and that b) there is often an inverse relationship between tractability/neglectedness and importance/impact of a cause area and charity. Not saying you’re wrong, but it’s not necessarily a problem.
Furthermore, my anecdotal take from the voting patterns as well as the comments on the discussion thread seem to indicate that neglectedness is often high on the mind of voters—though I admit that commenters on that thread are a biased sample of all those voting in the election.
Is it underwhelming? I guess if you want the donation election to be about spurring lots of donations to small, spunky EA-startups working in weird-er cause areas, it might be, but I don’t think that’s what I understand the intention of the experiment to be (though I could be wrong).
My take is that the election is an experiment with EA democratisation, where we get to see what the community values when we do a roughly 1-person-1-ballot system instead of those-with-the-moeny decide system which is how things work right now. Those takeaways seem to be:
The broad EA community values Animal Welfare a lot more than the current major funders
The broad EA community sees value in all 3 of the ‘big cause areas’ with high-scoring charities in Animal Welfare, AI Safety, and Global Health & Development.
I (with limited information) think the EA Animal Welfare Fund is promising, but wonder how much of that matches the intention of this experiment. It can be a bit underwhelming if an experiment to try to get the crowd’s takes on charities winds up determining to, “just let the current few experts figure it out.” Though I guess, that does represent a good state of the world. (The public thinks that the current experts are basically right)