Let's say you're going to donate some money, and plan to put some time into figuring out the best place to donate. The more time you put into your decision the better it's likely to be, but at some point you need to stop looking and actually make the donation. The more you're donating the longer it makes sense to go, since it's more valuable to better direct a larger amount of money. Can you get the benefits of the deeper research without increasing time spent on research? Weirdly, you can! About five years ago, Carl Schulman proposed (and ran the first) "donor lottery".
Say instead of donating $1k, you get together with 100 other people and you each put in $1k. You select one of the people at random (1:100) to choose where the pool ($100k) goes. This turns your 100% chance of directing $1k into a 1% chance of directing $100k. The goal is to make research more efficient:
If you win, you're working with enough money that it's worth it for you to put serious time into figuring out your best donation option.
If you lose, you don't need to put any time into determining where your money should go.
This isn't that different from giving your money to GiveWell or similar to decide how to distribute, in that it's delegating the decision to someone who can put in more research. Except that it doesn't require identifying someone better at allocating funds than you are, it just requires that you would:
Make better decisions in allocating $100k than $1k
Prefer a 1% chance of a well-allocated $100k to a 100% chance of a somewhat less well-allocated $1k.
If you come at this from a theoretical perspective this can seem really neat: better considered donations, more efficient use of research time, strictly better, literally no downsides, why would you not do this?
Despite basically agreeing with all of the above, however, I've not participated in a donor lottery, and I think they're likely slightly negative on balance. There actually are downsides, just not in areas that the logic above considers.
The biggest downside is that it makes your donation decisions less legible: it's harder for people to understand what you're doing and why. Lets say you're talking to a friend:
Friend: You're really into charity stuff, right? Where did you decide to donate this year?You: I put my money into a donor lottery. I traded my $10k for a 1% chance of donating $1M.
Friend: Did you win?
You: No, but I'm glad I did it! Let me explain why...
There are a few different ways this could go. Your friend could:
Listen to your explanation at length, and think "this is really cool, more efficient donation allocation, I bet EA is full of great ideas like this, I should learn more!"
Listen to your explanation at length, and think "maybe this works, but it seems like it could probably go wrong somehow."
Not have time or interest for the full explanation, and be left thinking you irresponsibly gambled away your annual donation.
I think (b) and (c) are going to happen often enough to outweigh both the benefit (a) and the benefit of the additional research. And this is in some sense a best case: your friend thinks well of you and is likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. The same conversation with someone you know less well or who doesn't have the same baseline assumption that you're an honest and principled person trying to do the right thing would likely go very poorly.
The other problem with that conversation is that you're not really answering the question! They're trying to figure out where they should donate, and are looking for your advice. Even if they come away thinking your decision to participate in the lottery makes some sense, they're unlikely to decide to participate the first time they hear about the idea, and so do still need to decide where to give. It's much better if you can explain what charity you picked, how you were thinking about it, and be able to answer followups. Importantly, I think this is better than explaining the donor lottery at illustrating EA thinking and helping people figure out if learning more about EA is something they'd enjoy.
I also have two smaller objections to donor lotteries:
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. I think you'd likely influence other funders enough that the time investment would be worth it, and you'd learn a lot. If this goes well you get the benefit of winning a donor lottery without having to actually win!
When I was earning to give I was in a position similar to someone who had won a donor lottery, in that I had enough money to allocate that it would be worth putting in substantial time deciding what to do with it. But in practice I didn't end up putting in that much time, the time I did put in didn't shift my views, and I ended up donating to the same places I expect I would have if I'd been donating much less money.
(I think the tradeoffs were less against donor lotteries in 2016 when they were first proposed, because there were many fewer people working full time on how to allocate EA money.)
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Disclaimers:
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:
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.
Some serious advantages of winning the donor lottery:
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.
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?