I donated to the donation election fund. Just wanted to add a note here about why, in the hopes of encouraging others. (1) I want to encourage more posts during Giving Season, and I expect that a larger pool of money in the donation election fund would incentivize this; (2) I expect that the vote will allocate donations to high impact donation opportunities that are approximately as cost-effective as the donations I counterfactually allocate on my own; (3) there is at least one reason to expect the community vote to yield better donations than my own independent choice (something something Condorcet Jury Theorem).
Edit: Just seeing that Toby has a nice and more thorough post on the value of donating to the fund here, for those who missed it.
Please don't use instant-runoff voting. This is a well-known, but not well-designed, voting system.
Â
Add up everyoneâs 1st choice to get a count for each candidate.
If there are more than 3 candidates with any votes, eliminate the least popular, and redistribute those votes according to the voters' next favourite choice.
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Plurality-based systems like this suffer from vote-splitting, which can incorrectly eliminate the most-preferred candidates, especially in elections with many candidates (like this one).
Counting only first-choice preferences is a highly flawed and undemocratic way to count ranked ballots. You're throwing away most of the preference data that voters expressed on their ballots. đ
The raw data for last year's IRV vote are available; that might (or might not) help you make an argument that the voting method is likely to produce a problematic result this year. E.g., someone more skilled at data analysis tools than I could probably figure out if there was any non-winning candidate who won all the pairwise comparisons with all other candidates.
OK I ran the numbers on the raw data. Â IRV happened to select the correct top 3 candidates, so that worked out OK, but it did not select them in the correct order or proportions (but it's pretty close, so it doesn't make much difference in this particular election).
The official results are:
RP: 37.0% = $9484
EAAWF: 32.3% = $8271
SWP: 30.6% = $7844
But when considering all preferences, not just first choices:
SWP was actually the true winner, preferred by 50.3% majority of voters over RP, by 50.9% over EAAWF, by 56.4% over WAI, etc.
EAAWF is runner-up, preferred by 50.2% over RP, by 57.2% over WAI, by 59.8% over THL, etc.
RP is third, preferred by 54.9% over WAI, by 59.2% over THL, etc.
I don't know of an established way to translate this to proportional winnings, but you might choose to break it up by pairwise margins between the top three, like this:
SWP: (50.9+50.3)/3 = 33.7% = $8636
EAAWF: (49.1+50.2)/3 = 33.1% = $8473
RP: (49.8+49.7)/3 = 33.2% = $8490
The majority preferences between the top three are pretty close to even, so something that evenly distributes money between them seems intuitively correct.
One thing I'd note is that the donation election doesn't necessarily have the same purposes as a standard political election. Spurring public deliberation and obtaining data on community preferences are probably more important than distributing the specific funds (especially this year with a smaller pot). That may blunt certain criticisms of IRV, or generate new ones that aren't as salient in a standard political context.Â
The ability to see running vote totals and change votes -- important for user engagement -- is also a distinguishing feature.
Yeah, the decision to select the top three candidates and divide funds between them is pretty arbitrary (and unlike a standard political election) but I think most people would agree that counting all voter preferences in that process is better than counting some voters' preferences while discarding others'.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
Hello! I'm Justin Portela. I got hired by GWWC to make YouTube videos after AI in Context did such a kickass job.Â
My channel is using that same cinematic, high-production value beauty to talk about everything in the EA universe that isn't AI.Â
Â
...
This is a linkpost for Request for Proposals: Research and Applied Work on Digital Minds.
I'm glad to announce a request for proposals for research and applied work on digital minds at Longview Ph...
Itâs that time again â Giving Season, 2025. Weâve got a packed schedule of events on the EA Forum, aimed at eliciting more and better donations, as well as reaching new audiences. In this post, Iâll tell you what to expect, and how you can help.
Last year, we calculate that organisations who posted on the Forum during giving season raised between $130K and $150K as a result. We'd love to beat that this year.Â
Throughout giving season I'll be encouraging posts on effective giving relevant topics, looking for earning-to-give-ers and organisations who might run relevant AMAs, etc... On top of this, we also have back-to-back events for Forum users to take part in.Â
Dates
Nov 10-16
Nov 17-23
Nov 24-Dec 7
Dec 8-14
Dec 15-EOY
Event
Funding Strategy Week
Marginal Funding Week
Donation Election
Â
âWhy I donateâ week
Donation Celebration Banner
Â
November 10th to 16th
A week for discussing questions around funding strategy (broadly construed). For example:
How can we diversify funding in EA?
Do current funders have distortionary effects on the communityâs cause prioritisation?
How useful are funding circles? Should there be more?
Write a question post, or post a relevant debate poll.
Take part in the discussions under the posts.Â
November 17th to 23rd
During marginal funding week, a range of organisations will write posts outlining their funding gaps for the next year, and what they can do with extra money.
We're making a cool custom page for the marginal funding week posts, which we hope to advertise to a broader audience of interested donors.Â
If you represent an organisation which wants to take part in marginal funding week or the donation election, message me on the Forum for details.Â
November 24th to December 7thÂ
During the donation election, you can vote (via ranked choice voting[1]) for the organisations which you think should receive funding from the donation election fund. You can also write posts making the case for prioritising particular causes or organisations, host relevant debates, and take part in the discussion in a pinned donation election thread.Â
A couple notes on eligibility
Only Forum users who have an account at the time of posting this announcement will be eligible to vote in the Donation Election (this is to avoid people making accounts in order to get extra votes).
Only organisations which have posted during marginal funding week and are (a) a registered charity in the UK, (b) a 501(c)3 in the US or (c) fiscally sponsored by one of those, are eligible for the election. This is purely because of the practicality of Effective Ventures regranting to the winners. Charities not eligible are heavily encouraged to take part in marginal funding week regardless.Â
There are awards available for donors, and collective awards if we hit certain totals in the fund. Find out more here.Â
December 8th to 14th
I want to help make donating effectively a social norm (and I'm sure a lot of you do too). An important part of achieving this is being public about donating and its role in your life.
 This is a week for doing just that - writing posts about why we donate. I'll be working with the comms team to spread the best content from the Forum to wider audiences throughout giving season (mostly via consistent social media posting), I expect this week will produce some motivational and/or confronting posts for those audiences.Â
GWWC is also corralling people to write 'Why I pledge' posts, and I'll be encouraging some organisations to publish staff donation posts like this one.Â
It's also be great to interview/ host AMAs with some earning to give folks (like this, and this). If you are one of these people, or you would like to recommend one, message me.Â
December 15th to the end of the year
For the last couple weeks of the year, we'll have a banner on the frontpage where you can drop a heart with a comment once you're done with your annual donations. It'll look something like this:
What's next?
In the next couple weeks, consider if you'd like to write a post for funding strategy week, and whether you'd like to donate to the donation election fund. Add the Forum events calendar to your google calendar if you'd like reminders of the current week, and what's coming up. Message me with suggestions for AMAs, or debates.Â
More details for each event will be published when they are coming up, but feel free to ask me anything in the comments regardless.Â
I donated to the donation election fund. Just wanted to add a note here about why, in the hopes of encouraging others. (1) I want to encourage more posts during Giving Season, and I expect that a larger pool of money in the donation election fund would incentivize this; (2) I expect that the vote will allocate donations to high impact donation opportunities that are approximately as cost-effective as the donations I counterfactually allocate on my own; (3) there is at least one reason to expect the community vote to yield better donations than my own independent choice (something something Condorcet Jury Theorem).
Edit: Just seeing that Toby has a nice and more thorough post on the value of donating to the fund here, for those who missed it.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j6fmnYM5ZRu9fJyrq/donation-election-how-to-vote says that this is plurality-based voting system, not Condorcet. âšď¸