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 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.