I’m not OP, but I have similar feelings about GiveWell. They have 19 full-time employees (at least 8 which are researchers). I am one person with a full-time non-research non-charity job. Assume I spend 40 hours on this if I win (around a month of free time). Running the numbers, I expect GiveWell to be able to spend at least 400x more time on this, and I expect their work to be far more productive because they wouldn’t be running themselves ragged with (effectively) two jobs, and the average GiveWell researcher already has more than a year of experience doing this and the connections that it comes with.
Regarding the target audience, I feel like the kinds of people who would enjoy doing this should either apply for a job at GiveWell, or start a new charity evaluator. If you think you can do better than they can, why rely a lottery victory to prove it?
I agree that GiveWell does high-quality research and identifies effective giving opportunities, and that donors can do reasonably well by deferring to their recommendations. I think it is not at all crazy to suspect that you can do better, and I do not personally give to GiveWell recommended charities. Note for example that Holden also does not donate exclusively to GiveWell charities, and indeed is generally supportive of using either lotteries or delegation to trusted individuals.
GiveWell does not purport to solve the general problem of “where should EA’s give money.” They purport to evaluate one kind of intervention: “programs that have been studied rigorously and ideally repeatedly, and whose benefits we can reasonably expect to generalize to large populations, though there are limits to the generalizability of any study results. The set of programs fitting this description is relatively limited, and mostly found in the category of health interventions” (here)
The situation isn’t “you think for X hours, and the more hours you think the better the opportunities you can find, which you can then spend arbitrarily large amounts of money on.” You need to do thinking in order to identify opportunities to do good, which can accept a certain amount of money. In order to have identify a better donation opportunity than GiveWell, one does not have to do more work than GiveWell / delegate to someone who has done more work.
By thinking longer, you could identify a different delegation strategy, rather than finding an object level recommendation. You aren’t improving on GiveWell’s research, just on your current view that GiveWell is the right person to defer to. There are many people who have spent much longer than you thinking about where to give, and at a minimum you are picking one of them. Having large piles of money and being thoughtful about where to give it is the kind of situation that (for example) makes it possible for GiveWell to get started, and it seems somewhat perverse to celebrate GiveWell while placing no value on the conditions that allow it to come to exist.
In a normal world, the easiest recommendations to notice/verify/follow would receive the most attention, and so all else equal you might get higher returns by looking for recommendations that are harder.
If you think GiveWell recommended charities are the best intervention, then you should be pretty much risk neutral over the scale of $100k or even $1M. So the cost is relatively low (perhaps mostly my 0.5% haircut) and you would have to be pretty confident in your view (despite the fact that many thoughtful people disagree) in order to make it worthless.
The point of lotteries is not to have fun or prove that we are clever, it is to use money well.
I think my answer to all of this is: that sounds great but wouldn’t it be better if it wasn’t random?
If you have the skills and interest to do charity evaluation, why wait to win the lottery when you could join or start a charity evaluator? If you need money, running a fundraiser seems better than hoping to win the lottery.
If you think you’re likely to find a better meta charity than GiveWell, it seems better to just do that research now and write a blog post to make other people aware your results, rather than the more convoluted method of writing blog posts to convince people to join a lottery and then hoping to win.
And if you aren’t very interested in charity research, why join a donor lottery that picks the decider at random when you could join one where it’s always the most competent member (100% of the time, GiveWell gets to decide how to allocate the donation)?
I think my answer to all of this is: that sounds great but wouldn’t it be better if it wasn’t random?
Why would that be better?
If you think you’re likely to find a better meta charity than GiveWell, it seems better to just do that research now and write a blog post to make other people aware your results
I think you are radically, radically underestimating the difficulty of reaching consensus on challenging questions.
For example: a significant fraction of openphil staff make significant contributions to charities other than GiveWell recommendations, and that in many cases they haven’t reached consensus with each other; some give to farm animal welfare, some to science, some to political causes, etc.; even within causes there is significant disagreement. This is despite the fact that they spend most of their time thinking about philanthropy (though not about their personal giving).
why join a donor lottery that picks the decider at random when you could join one where it’s always the most competent member
If you will certainly follow GiveWell recommendations after winning, then gambling makes no difference and isn’t worth the effort (though hopefully it will eventually take nearly 0 effort, so it’s really a wash). If you think that GiveWell is the most competent decider, yet somehow don’t think that you will follow their recommendations, then I’m not sure what to say to you. If you are concerned about other people making bad decisions with their money, well that’s not really your problem and it’s orthogonal to whether they gamble with it.
I’m not OP, but I have similar feelings about GiveWell. They have 19 full-time employees (at least 8 which are researchers). I am one person with a full-time non-research non-charity job. Assume I spend 40 hours on this if I win (around a month of free time). Running the numbers, I expect GiveWell to be able to spend at least 400x more time on this, and I expect their work to be far more productive because they wouldn’t be running themselves ragged with (effectively) two jobs, and the average GiveWell researcher already has more than a year of experience doing this and the connections that it comes with.
Regarding the target audience, I feel like the kinds of people who would enjoy doing this should either apply for a job at GiveWell, or start a new charity evaluator. If you think you can do better than they can, why rely a lottery victory to prove it?
I agree that GiveWell does high-quality research and identifies effective giving opportunities, and that donors can do reasonably well by deferring to their recommendations. I think it is not at all crazy to suspect that you can do better, and I do not personally give to GiveWell recommended charities. Note for example that Holden also does not donate exclusively to GiveWell charities, and indeed is generally supportive of using either lotteries or delegation to trusted individuals.
GiveWell does not purport to solve the general problem of “where should EA’s give money.” They purport to evaluate one kind of intervention: “programs that have been studied rigorously and ideally repeatedly, and whose benefits we can reasonably expect to generalize to large populations, though there are limits to the generalizability of any study results. The set of programs fitting this description is relatively limited, and mostly found in the category of health interventions” (here)
The situation isn’t “you think for X hours, and the more hours you think the better the opportunities you can find, which you can then spend arbitrarily large amounts of money on.” You need to do thinking in order to identify opportunities to do good, which can accept a certain amount of money. In order to have identify a better donation opportunity than GiveWell, one does not have to do more work than GiveWell / delegate to someone who has done more work.
By thinking longer, you could identify a different delegation strategy, rather than finding an object level recommendation. You aren’t improving on GiveWell’s research, just on your current view that GiveWell is the right person to defer to. There are many people who have spent much longer than you thinking about where to give, and at a minimum you are picking one of them. Having large piles of money and being thoughtful about where to give it is the kind of situation that (for example) makes it possible for GiveWell to get started, and it seems somewhat perverse to celebrate GiveWell while placing no value on the conditions that allow it to come to exist.
In a normal world, the easiest recommendations to notice/verify/follow would receive the most attention, and so all else equal you might get higher returns by looking for recommendations that are harder.
If you think GiveWell recommended charities are the best intervention, then you should be pretty much risk neutral over the scale of $100k or even $1M. So the cost is relatively low (perhaps mostly my 0.5% haircut) and you would have to be pretty confident in your view (despite the fact that many thoughtful people disagree) in order to make it worthless.
The point of lotteries is not to have fun or prove that we are clever, it is to use money well.
I think my answer to all of this is: that sounds great but wouldn’t it be better if it wasn’t random?
If you have the skills and interest to do charity evaluation, why wait to win the lottery when you could join or start a charity evaluator? If you need money, running a fundraiser seems better than hoping to win the lottery.
If you think you’re likely to find a better meta charity than GiveWell, it seems better to just do that research now and write a blog post to make other people aware your results, rather than the more convoluted method of writing blog posts to convince people to join a lottery and then hoping to win.
And if you aren’t very interested in charity research, why join a donor lottery that picks the decider at random when you could join one where it’s always the most competent member (100% of the time, GiveWell gets to decide how to allocate the donation)?
Why would that be better?
I think you are radically, radically underestimating the difficulty of reaching consensus on challenging questions.
For example: a significant fraction of openphil staff make significant contributions to charities other than GiveWell recommendations, and that in many cases they haven’t reached consensus with each other; some give to farm animal welfare, some to science, some to political causes, etc.; even within causes there is significant disagreement. This is despite the fact that they spend most of their time thinking about philanthropy (though not about their personal giving).
If you will certainly follow GiveWell recommendations after winning, then gambling makes no difference and isn’t worth the effort (though hopefully it will eventually take nearly 0 effort, so it’s really a wash). If you think that GiveWell is the most competent decider, yet somehow don’t think that you will follow their recommendations, then I’m not sure what to say to you. If you are concerned about other people making bad decisions with their money, well that’s not really your problem and it’s orthogonal to whether they gamble with it.