Im really curious about your work to give donors the tools to choose between evaluators based on their values.
One big difference between investment funds and charitable funds is that lay people can at least evaluate funds on some basic metrics such as market returns versus a benchmark. Both for accountability and for the purpose of aligning charity fund/ evaluator chooses with values, some further tooling seems valuable.
Do you have any comments on the accountability piece?
Finally, I would add another downside of lotteries, which is that donors need to trust that most participants will have similar values to them, and the knowledge / skills to do research. This trust seems easier to grant to evaluators or funds.
I agree that providing accountability to evaluators is a real challenge. I don’t have much more to add right now, other than we really hope our work will help!
As for your last point—at least from a simple expected-value perspective, I’m not sure you should care too much about other lottery participant’s values. The idea is that by donating to the lotter, you’re not increasing the expected amount of money other participants influence. Of course, there could be other reasons to not want to participate in lotteries with people whose values you don’t share.
Thanks for this great response.
Im really curious about your work to give donors the tools to choose between evaluators based on their values.
One big difference between investment funds and charitable funds is that lay people can at least evaluate funds on some basic metrics such as market returns versus a benchmark. Both for accountability and for the purpose of aligning charity fund/ evaluator chooses with values, some further tooling seems valuable.
Do you have any comments on the accountability piece?
Finally, I would add another downside of lotteries, which is that donors need to trust that most participants will have similar values to them, and the knowledge / skills to do research. This trust seems easier to grant to evaluators or funds.
I agree that providing accountability to evaluators is a real challenge. I don’t have much more to add right now, other than we really hope our work will help!
As for your last point—at least from a simple expected-value perspective, I’m not sure you should care too much about other lottery participant’s values. The idea is that by donating to the lotter, you’re not increasing the expected amount of money other participants influence. Of course, there could be other reasons to not want to participate in lotteries with people whose values you don’t share.
Re: value alignment, that’s a great point, it looks like I fell victim to a bit of loss aversion! (I imagine I’m not alone)