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
I'm certainly happy with that. I think it's important to point out the positive externalities to the community/other donors if people make interesting research findings, especially if there's a relatively high likelihood that people will be investing time and energy into the research. When responding I had in mind that this could be a very minimalistic thing (e.g. the name of the recipient and possibly a couple of sentences explaining the thinking behind the decision), but on reflection I think the words 'write-up of their research and reasoning' in the OP imply something much more substantial. In either case, I agree that it'd be bad for this to feel like a cost that stopped people entering, so I'm endorsing your phrasing, and I'll edit my previous message to point this out.
Yes, you're right. I was thinking of a more detailed and substantial post on why the winner selected their charity / charities. Although it wouldn't have to be onerous, I expect one or two paragraphs with accomanying links to research would be good enough.
Whil... (read more)