I think most people should at least have a best guess about where they would donate if they hadn’t participated in a lottery, and if it’s easy then they should plausibly give a token amount directly (like 10%). This makes “give to lottery” much more comparable to “give directly” since you’ve still spent the time thinking about it, have your head in the game, and can talk from experience about that decision. (Another simple reason to do this is to confirm that actually diminishing returns aren’t a big deal wherever you were planning to donate.)
If someone really means to ask “where should I donate?” and “not where did you donate?” then it seems like you can just answer that question. Giving 10% to the object level makes that even easier but I feel like I can basically do that even when I don’t give directly to the particular charity I’m discussing. (That said, I probably get asked this question much less than you and by a very different distribution of people.)
I particularly like donor lotteries because I think they are one of the cleanest “wins” amongst all EA recommendations for small donors (though not one of the largest wins). I think it’s really complicated to assess whether you should defer to EAs that you don’t really know, but that there are great arguments that most donors would be better served by using a lottery. So I consider it one of the most legible ways to clearly demonstrate that EA is just better at donating than other communities (rather than merely having complex methodological disagreements).
I think that donor lotteries seem better for the health of the community than having a bunch of small donors who have no option other than deferring to a centralized recommender (whose work they often can’t check very thoroughly). It empowers more people to have meaningful influence over how charity is done. “Small donors should just defer to professionals” might be right but I don’t think it’s very legibly right, and it relies on a bunch of trust. In practice if you are donating $10-100k I think that a lot of that has to be social proof rather than having the time to dig into claims enough to reliably tell that GiveWell knows their stuff. And even if everyone defers to an evaluator, the form of accountability seems important and I’d prefer evaluators be accountable to 10x fewer donors with 10x more time. Relatedly, I think this makes it easier in practice to start a competitor and market to a smaller number of large donors based on quality product.
I do think a significant fraction of people (especially in tech or finance) respond positively to the idea of donor lotteries, and having the option value to talk about the object level or lotteries based on the audience seems good. Again, I think this might differ because we are talking to different audiences in a different way. I also think that I’m more interested in weird stuff than you, so I’m maybe particularly willing to lose out on prospective donors who aren’t willing to spend 30 minutes thinking about a plausible-looking but weird idea, or who can’t handle expected value calculations. And in general I more want EA to be the kind of place that does weird but good stuff.
I don’t think that “lots of people are thinking about the allocation of EA funds” has made it that much easier to be a small donor. Which of those people am I supposed to defer to? Also, I qualitatively don’t feel like the ratio of (money moved) vs (time spent thinking about allocation) is that much better than it was in 2016. I wouldn’t be surprised if both of those have grown ~4x in parallel.
I agree some lottery-winners give to the same kinds of things that they would have given to otherwise, but in the two cases where I have the most information it seems like the outcome was very different. (For several of these grants I think that giving smaller amounts would not have been an option.) It’s also worth noting that most small donors give much worse than you, and for many of them it would be great if “spend more time to think” got them up to “defer to GiveWell.”
I’d guess that your earning to give situation was similar to a small lottery winner but not a large lottery winner, and if you donated somewhere without significant diminishing returns then I think it might have made sense to go to an even larger scale. (Right now I personally feel like it’s pretty plausible that a philanthropist with a $10M budget should do a lottery with a big EA foundation up to a $100M budget, if they’d offer it, though I’d defer to funders and charities about what they think would make for a healthier ecosystem.)
I think most people should at least have a best guess about where they would donate if they hadn’t participated in a lottery, and if it’s easy then they should plausibly give a token amount directly (like 10%). This makes “give to lottery” much more comparable to “give directly” since you’ve still spent the time thinking about it, have your head in the game, and can talk from experience about that decision. (Another simple reason to do this is to confirm that actually diminishing returns aren’t a big deal wherever you were planning to donate.)
If someone really means to ask “where should I donate?” and “not where did you donate?” then it seems like you can just answer that question. Giving 10% to the object level makes that even easier but I feel like I can basically do that even when I don’t give directly to the particular charity I’m discussing. (That said, I probably get asked this question much less than you and by a very different distribution of people.)
I particularly like donor lotteries because I think they are one of the cleanest “wins” amongst all EA recommendations for small donors (though not one of the largest wins). I think it’s really complicated to assess whether you should defer to EAs that you don’t really know, but that there are great arguments that most donors would be better served by using a lottery. So I consider it one of the most legible ways to clearly demonstrate that EA is just better at donating than other communities (rather than merely having complex methodological disagreements).
I think that donor lotteries seem better for the health of the community than having a bunch of small donors who have no option other than deferring to a centralized recommender (whose work they often can’t check very thoroughly). It empowers more people to have meaningful influence over how charity is done. “Small donors should just defer to professionals” might be right but I don’t think it’s very legibly right, and it relies on a bunch of trust. In practice if you are donating $10-100k I think that a lot of that has to be social proof rather than having the time to dig into claims enough to reliably tell that GiveWell knows their stuff. And even if everyone defers to an evaluator, the form of accountability seems important and I’d prefer evaluators be accountable to 10x fewer donors with 10x more time. Relatedly, I think this makes it easier in practice to start a competitor and market to a smaller number of large donors based on quality product.
I do think a significant fraction of people (especially in tech or finance) respond positively to the idea of donor lotteries, and having the option value to talk about the object level or lotteries based on the audience seems good. Again, I think this might differ because we are talking to different audiences in a different way. I also think that I’m more interested in weird stuff than you, so I’m maybe particularly willing to lose out on prospective donors who aren’t willing to spend 30 minutes thinking about a plausible-looking but weird idea, or who can’t handle expected value calculations. And in general I more want EA to be the kind of place that does weird but good stuff.
I don’t think that “lots of people are thinking about the allocation of EA funds” has made it that much easier to be a small donor. Which of those people am I supposed to defer to? Also, I qualitatively don’t feel like the ratio of (money moved) vs (time spent thinking about allocation) is that much better than it was in 2016. I wouldn’t be surprised if both of those have grown ~4x in parallel.
I agree some lottery-winners give to the same kinds of things that they would have given to otherwise, but in the two cases where I have the most information it seems like the outcome was very different. (For several of these grants I think that giving smaller amounts would not have been an option.) It’s also worth noting that most small donors give much worse than you, and for many of them it would be great if “spend more time to think” got them up to “defer to GiveWell.”
I’d guess that your earning to give situation was similar to a small lottery winner but not a large lottery winner, and if you donated somewhere without significant diminishing returns then I think it might have made sense to go to an even larger scale. (Right now I personally feel like it’s pretty plausible that a philanthropist with a $10M budget should do a lottery with a big EA foundation up to a $100M budget, if they’d offer it, though I’d defer to funders and charities about what they think would make for a healthier ecosystem.)