Writing quickly about a complex topic I have many vague ideas about
I won the $500k donor lottery, and it has been a very emotional experience, I think I will be in a better position to evaluate this in ~5 years, I’m extremely biased
Even trying to take into account my strong bias, I’m strongly in favor of donor lotteries, here are my 2 cents:
I confirm that you do get negative reactions to the concept of a “donor lottery” from most people, but you get even more negative reactions when you tell people you’re donating most of your income, as I’m sure you know better than me. I would go with the advice in why you should give to a donor lottery
we recommend that most people still make direct donations with some fraction of their donation budget. You can put most of your donations towards the donor lottery, and use the rest to donate wherever you would have if there wasn’t a donor lottery.
I personally would recommend 50-50 for most people, but with high variance. I think it would heavily mitigate your points b) and c), and keep you informed enough about giving opportunities to provide useful advice.
You can still share with people your direct donations and I think you have roughly the same influence whether you donate X to an organization or 2X. You can mention the donor lottery only to people that might find it interesting or useful.
If with some research you have a good chance of identifying better donation opportunities than “give to GiveWell or EA Funds”, I’d be excited for you to do that and write up your results [...] there were many fewer people working full time on how to allocate EA money
In my experience, there are now many funds and grantmakers to choose from! The problem moved one level up but it’s still there.
An advantage of moving to the ~$500k scale is that it makes sense for me to ask people that seem knowledgeable and trustworthy to confirm whether a fund/evaluator is actually reliable. It actually turned out that one (of the many) probably wasn’t at the time, and I definitely might have donated to it otherwise.
I also think that donating to GiveWell’s “All grants fund” is probably just better than donating directly to one of the recommended charities, because GiveWell only funds particularly effective programs, and many top charities run many programs in many countries with various levels of cost-effectiveness. But I see many donors not making these kinds of considerations that I think they would make if they won a donor lottery. Another way to say this: many EA donors, like silly me last year, do not give to GiveWell funds or EA Funds, maybe for reasons similar to your points b) and c).
When I was donating my last 10k last year I was reading things that made me doubt the optimality of GiveWell’s recommendation (like this series). At that scale, it would have been hard to justify the time to investigate whether those claims have merit.
Some IMHO more serious downsides of the donor lottery:
Unilateralist’s curse, especially for longtermist funding where many opportunities have sign uncertainty
Potentially a less representative distribution compared to a “free market” approach where small funders distribute money according to their values. e.g. if half of the funders care only about insect suffering and half care only about mental health, it might be better to allocate the funds accordingly, instead of having 100% insects or 100% mental health depending on who wins the lottery.
People might over update on the opinions of a random lottery winner, compared to a grantmaker that was selected meritocratically, or a funder that at least earned the money.
It might be treated by the winner like “monopoly money”, without the moral seriousness of considering the thousands of lives it impacts.
Some serious advantages of winning the donor lottery:
It makes sense to verify that the fund/evaluator you would be donating to is actually reliable with much higher confidence and compare funds with each other. (A popular one probably wasn’t until months or years ago)
It makes sense to go much deeper into EA and cause prioritization. e.g. How much should I care about animals, WELLBYs vs QALYs vs GiveWell moral weights, longtermism vs short-termism, population ethics in general, whether to fund research or proved interventions). This helps not just with allocating the donor lottery winnings, but with all future donations and career choices, and helps give much better donation advice to various friends. I learned basic concepts like “population ethics” and “theory of change” only after winning the lottery. I expect many donors to not be familiar with these basic topics and I am still learning a lot. Also, how to decide allocation across cause areas seems a very tricky question, sensitive to ethical questions that there is no consensus on.
Many reliable people, even at large funds, encourage funding diversity. Especially for opportunities in the $50k ~ $1M range, which might be too large for very small funders and too small for very large funders. There are professional grantmakers for these, but they have different opinions on where the marginal $100k should go (which I think is good!)
Despite the perception of abundant funding for EA orgs, many of their leaders still spend a significant amount of time fundraising, which has a large opportunity cost. If you can identify things that would have otherwise been funded by EA funds anyway, you can save them significant amounts of time.
Publishing a grantmaking report after winning a donor lottery allows you to signal-boost projects that you considered especially valuable, providing them with more reach even if funding-wise you would already cover their funding gap.
It could accelerate the career of potentially promising grantmakers, the correlation between grantmaking skill and grantmaking budget seems far from perfect. You could use the lottery funds to provide valuable experience to someone that one day might work for e.g. Schmidt Futures.
It would be easier to find opportunities for leverage, you influence donations less when losing but potentially more when winning. I did end up talking to way more people about EA (with mixed results).
I think the existing donor lotteries might have been too small for someone at your scale to appreciate the advantages, would you feel the same about a ~$10M donor lottery?
Disclaimers:
Writing quickly about a complex topic I have many vague ideas about
I won the $500k donor lottery, and it has been a very emotional experience, I think I will be in a better position to evaluate this in ~5 years, I’m extremely biased
Even trying to take into account my strong bias, I’m strongly in favor of donor lotteries, here are my 2 cents:
I confirm that you do get negative reactions to the concept of a “donor lottery” from most people, but you get even more negative reactions when you tell people you’re donating most of your income, as I’m sure you know better than me.
I would go with the advice in why you should give to a donor lottery
I personally would recommend 50-50 for most people, but with high variance. I think it would heavily mitigate your points b) and c), and keep you informed enough about giving opportunities to provide useful advice.
You can still share with people your direct donations and I think you have roughly the same influence whether you donate X to an organization or 2X. You can mention the donor lottery only to people that might find it interesting or useful.
In my experience, there are now many funds and grantmakers to choose from! The problem moved one level up but it’s still there.
An advantage of moving to the ~$500k scale is that it makes sense for me to ask people that seem knowledgeable and trustworthy to confirm whether a fund/evaluator is actually reliable. It actually turned out that one (of the many) probably wasn’t at the time, and I definitely might have donated to it otherwise.
I also think that donating to GiveWell’s “All grants fund” is probably just better than donating directly to one of the recommended charities, because GiveWell only funds particularly effective programs, and many top charities run many programs in many countries with various levels of cost-effectiveness. But I see many donors not making these kinds of considerations that I think they would make if they won a donor lottery.
Another way to say this: many EA donors, like silly me last year, do not give to GiveWell funds or EA Funds, maybe for reasons similar to your points b) and c).
When I was donating my last 10k last year I was reading things that made me doubt the optimality of GiveWell’s recommendation (like this series). At that scale, it would have been hard to justify the time to investigate whether those claims have merit.
Some IMHO more serious downsides of the donor lottery:
Unilateralist’s curse, especially for longtermist funding where many opportunities have sign uncertainty
Potentially a less representative distribution compared to a “free market” approach where small funders distribute money according to their values.
e.g. if half of the funders care only about insect suffering and half care only about mental health, it might be better to allocate the funds accordingly, instead of having 100% insects or 100% mental health depending on who wins the lottery.
People might over update on the opinions of a random lottery winner, compared to a grantmaker that was selected meritocratically, or a funder that at least earned the money.
It might be treated by the winner like “monopoly money”, without the moral seriousness of considering the thousands of lives it impacts.
Some serious advantages of winning the donor lottery:
It makes sense to verify that the fund/evaluator you would be donating to is actually reliable with much higher confidence and compare funds with each other. (A popular one probably wasn’t until months or years ago)
It makes sense to go much deeper into EA and cause prioritization. e.g. How much should I care about animals, WELLBYs vs QALYs vs GiveWell moral weights, longtermism vs short-termism, population ethics in general, whether to fund research or proved interventions). This helps not just with allocating the donor lottery winnings, but with all future donations and career choices, and helps give much better donation advice to various friends.
I learned basic concepts like “population ethics” and “theory of change” only after winning the lottery. I expect many donors to not be familiar with these basic topics and I am still learning a lot. Also, how to decide allocation across cause areas seems a very tricky question, sensitive to ethical questions that there is no consensus on.
Many reliable people, even at large funds, encourage funding diversity. Especially for opportunities in the $50k ~ $1M range, which might be too large for very small funders and too small for very large funders. There are professional grantmakers for these, but they have different opinions on where the marginal $100k should go (which I think is good!)
Despite the perception of abundant funding for EA orgs, many of their leaders still spend a significant amount of time fundraising, which has a large opportunity cost. If you can identify things that would have otherwise been funded by EA funds anyway, you can save them significant amounts of time.
Publishing a grantmaking report after winning a donor lottery allows you to signal-boost projects that you considered especially valuable, providing them with more reach even if funding-wise you would already cover their funding gap.
It could accelerate the career of potentially promising grantmakers, the correlation between grantmaking skill and grantmaking budget seems far from perfect. You could use the lottery funds to provide valuable experience to someone that one day might work for e.g. Schmidt Futures.
It would be easier to find opportunities for leverage, you influence donations less when losing but potentially more when winning. I did end up talking to way more people about EA (with mixed results).
I think the existing donor lotteries might have been too small for someone at your scale to appreciate the advantages, would you feel the same about a ~$10M donor lottery?