as recently implemented by Paul Christiano in cooperation with Carl Shulman
(implemented by Carl Shulman in cooperation with Paul Christiano)
In general, I think that “random dictator” may often be a better governance system than a committee or a democracy (except where there are diminishing returns and limited ability to negotiate from behind a veil of ignorance).
I think that “thinking more” is by far the most important source of returns to scale in the $1,000 - $100,000 range.
Thanks for the correction, I’ll fix the wording. Seems like Carl should make that clearer in his post too. I took the post to be saying that you’d handled the implementation and Carl had done the writeup.
I came up with the idea and basic method, then asked Paul if he would provide a donor lottery facility. He did so, and has been taking in entrants and solving logistical issues as they come up.
I agree that thinking/researching/discussing more dominates the gains in the $1-100k range.
Is giving small amounts of money away really something that individuals should spend a lot of time thinking about—like many days of research?
Is picking 9 other people whose competence you trust and delegating the decision to a randomly chosen one of them much easier than just doing whatever research you wanted to do, and then sharing your results? Are givewell doing duch a bad job at making recommendations that you have to improvise this and do their job for them?
(implemented by Carl Shulman in cooperation with Paul Christiano)
In general, I think that “random dictator” may often be a better governance system than a committee or a democracy (except where there are diminishing returns and limited ability to negotiate from behind a veil of ignorance).
I think that “thinking more” is by far the most important source of returns to scale in the $1,000 - $100,000 range.
Thanks for the correction, I’ll fix the wording. Seems like Carl should make that clearer in his post too. I took the post to be saying that you’d handled the implementation and Carl had done the writeup.
I came up with the idea and basic method, then asked Paul if he would provide a donor lottery facility. He did so, and has been taking in entrants and solving logistical issues as they come up.
I agree that thinking/researching/discussing more dominates the gains in the $1-100k range.
Is giving small amounts of money away really something that individuals should spend a lot of time thinking about—like many days of research?
Is picking 9 other people whose competence you trust and delegating the decision to a randomly chosen one of them much easier than just doing whatever research you wanted to do, and then sharing your results? Are givewell doing duch a bad job at making recommendations that you have to improvise this and do their job for them?
I think we have an underassignment of credit problem here. You can’t both be the junior partner in this. :P
Thanks for describing the details a bit more.
I too agree that the gains mainly come from more/better evaluation.