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
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.
While I agree that deterring people from entering because of social pressure is not a good outcome, I'm not entirely sure I agree that the conclusion is that there's no expectation for the winner to share their reasoning. I place more value on the upsides of transparency than the potential downside of feeling social pressure, and I wonder if there isn't another way to alleviate the social pressure while still maintaining something like a "low bar" expectation for the winner to share their findings.
For example, CEA could share the winner's reasoning anonymously.
What are the biggest upsides of transparency?
The actual value of the information produced seems modest.