We’re excited to announce that EffectiveAltruism.org is hosting the 2017 effective altruism donor lottery!
A donation lottery is a different way to donate. Rather than making a donation to a charitable organization directly, you can make a donation to a donor lottery. You then get a shot at being able to recommend where the entire pool of money goes, in proportion to the size of your donation.
The concept was described by Carl Shulman in 2016, and in late 2016, Carl and Paul Christiano successfully ran the first donor lottery.
Carl and Paul have asked the Centre for Effective Altruism (the organization that runs EffectiveAltruism.org) to take on the responsibility of running this year’s lottery. As with the original lottery, Paul is acting as lottery guarantor, backstopping the lottery pot size of $100,000.
As this is the first time we’ve run the lottery on EffectiveAltruism.org, we’re considering this section of the site to be in open beta. If you notice anything that looks out of place, if anything in the explanation is unclear, or anything doesn’t work as expected, we’d really appreciate your feedback, either via the chat bubble at the bottom right of the screen, via lottery [at] effectivealtruism [dot] org, or in the comments below.
Sam Deere
Tech lead, Centre for Effective Altruism
Interesting! Some questions from the explanation on the website:
It's not clear to me how a donor lottery would capture all the considerations. Can you elaborate?
Does this presume that (some) donors already know where they prefer to donate, rather than offsetting time spent on additional research with a larger donation pool?
Is there an expectation (or requirement) that the winning donor provides a write-up of their research and reasoning for their selected charity?
In this case, you haven't found an advisor who you trust to take into account all the things you consider to be relevant. So, instead of relying on a third-party advisor, you do the research yourself. As research is costly for any given individual to undertake, it may not make sense for you to do this with a smaller donations, but with the larger pot, if you win, you've got more incentive to undertake whatever research you feel is necessary (i.e. that 'captu... (read more)