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 curious about why blocks were chosen rather than just a single-lottery scheme, i.e., having all donors contribute to the same lottery, with a $100k backstop but no upper limit. The justification on the webpage is
But of course we could satisfy this requirement with the single-lottery scheme. The single-lottery scheme also has the benefits that (1) the guarantor has significantly less risk since there's a much higher chance they need to pay nothing, especially once the popularity of donor lotteries is more stable and (2) the "leverage" can get arbitrarily high rather than being capped by $100k/. The main feature (benefit?) of the multi-block scheme is, as Carl says elsewhere in this thread, "the odds of payouts for other participants are unaffected by anyone's particular participation in this lottery design". But it's not clear to me why this non-interaction principle is better than allowing large leverage. We just want to be really careful about unintended incentives?
A $200k lottery has about 4x as much cost-via-risk as a $100k lottery. Realistically I think that smaller sizes (with the option to lottery up further) are significantly better than bigger pots. As the pot gets bigger you need to do more and more thinking to verify that the risk isn't an issue.
If you were OK with variable pot sizes, I think the thing to do would be: