The Nonlinear Library EA - Vote in the Donation Election by 15 December by Lizka
Dec 9, 2023
09:33
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Vote in the Donation Election by 15 December, published by Lizka on December 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
TL;DR:
Vote here by 15 December. Voting should take 2-10 minutes and you'll be able to edit your vote until the deadline. (The deadline for
donating to the Donation Election Fund is 20 December.)
You can vote if you had a Forum account by October 22, 2023. If you didn't, you can still
share where you're donating or
make the case for voting for some candidates over others.
Vote in the Donation Election 2023
Read about the candidates
More context:
The
Donation Election Fund (currently around $34,000) will be designated for the top three candidates in the
Donation Election (in proportion to the vote). You can
read about the candidates here.
How long does voting take, and how does it work?
Voting should take around 2-10 minutes.[1]
You'll be able to edit your vote anytime before December 15.
The
voting system is outlined here; your vote should basically just represent how you'd allocate funding between the candidates, and the voting portal will walk you through the process for that.
Should I actually vote in the Donation Election? (I haven't read all the posts, I'm not that informed, I don't think it matters that much…)
I think yes, you should vote (if your account was made before October 22 this year). Some reasons for my belief that you should vote (2-5 are most compelling to me):
You'll influence how funds are distributed - probably in a positive way even if you don't think you have that much expertise or context.
There are currently ~215 votes. The Donation Election Fund has ~$34,000. So (very very approximately) you'd be affecting ~$150 in donations in expectation.
Additionally, I think you should have a prior that more votes will lead to a better outcome. Aggregation mechanisms generally function better when there are more inputs, so the combined result should improve if you add to it even if you're not super informed. See e.g.
this analysis of Metaculus community predictions, which suggests that the Metaculus community prediction improves approximately logarithmically with the number of forecasters. (See also
this post.)[2]
You'll add useful information to the voting data.
I think the data we'll get from the Donation Election could be extremely useful; we'll have a sense for people's priorities, and we might identify blind spots or important points of disagreement. But it'll be a lot more useful if more people vote. (Moreover, if you're not sure about voting, you might be part of a group that's less likely to vote, which will be underrepresented in the information we'll get.)
Voting will prompt you to think a bit more about your donation choices.
It might be fun for you.
Voting is a public/collective good of sorts, and you might value being the kind of person who contributes to public goods.
The downside is limited.
You might waste some time (but you can time-cap yourself). If you're worried about mis-directing funds, you can view this as a fairly low-cost exercise. You'll affect more than a trivial amount of money (unless we get tons of votes), but it won't be that big; I think the second-order effects (2-5) will outweigh the effect of directing funds (1).
Some other common questions
Why isn't charity X a candidate?
We restricted candidates to the charities on
this list, largely for logistical reasons and vetting capacity, which stopped some charities from being candidates (we might change this next year if we run an election again). If the charity is on that list, it's not a candidate because nobody
nominated it on time. Consider sharing a post about why people should donate to the charity, though!
Why can't people whose accounts are newer than October 22, 2023 vote?
We added this restriction to prevent vote manipulation (we'll also be checking i...
TL;DR:
Vote here by 15 December. Voting should take 2-10 minutes and you'll be able to edit your vote until the deadline. (The deadline for
donating to the Donation Election Fund is 20 December.)
You can vote if you had a Forum account by October 22, 2023. If you didn't, you can still
share where you're donating or
make the case for voting for some candidates over others.
Vote in the Donation Election 2023
Read about the candidates
More context:
The
Donation Election Fund (currently around $34,000) will be designated for the top three candidates in the
Donation Election (in proportion to the vote). You can
read about the candidates here.
How long does voting take, and how does it work?
Voting should take around 2-10 minutes.[1]
You'll be able to edit your vote anytime before December 15.
The
voting system is outlined here; your vote should basically just represent how you'd allocate funding between the candidates, and the voting portal will walk you through the process for that.
Should I actually vote in the Donation Election? (I haven't read all the posts, I'm not that informed, I don't think it matters that much…)
I think yes, you should vote (if your account was made before October 22 this year). Some reasons for my belief that you should vote (2-5 are most compelling to me):
You'll influence how funds are distributed - probably in a positive way even if you don't think you have that much expertise or context.
There are currently ~215 votes. The Donation Election Fund has ~$34,000. So (very very approximately) you'd be affecting ~$150 in donations in expectation.
Additionally, I think you should have a prior that more votes will lead to a better outcome. Aggregation mechanisms generally function better when there are more inputs, so the combined result should improve if you add to it even if you're not super informed. See e.g.
this analysis of Metaculus community predictions, which suggests that the Metaculus community prediction improves approximately logarithmically with the number of forecasters. (See also
this post.)[2]
You'll add useful information to the voting data.
I think the data we'll get from the Donation Election could be extremely useful; we'll have a sense for people's priorities, and we might identify blind spots or important points of disagreement. But it'll be a lot more useful if more people vote. (Moreover, if you're not sure about voting, you might be part of a group that's less likely to vote, which will be underrepresented in the information we'll get.)
Voting will prompt you to think a bit more about your donation choices.
It might be fun for you.
Voting is a public/collective good of sorts, and you might value being the kind of person who contributes to public goods.
The downside is limited.
You might waste some time (but you can time-cap yourself). If you're worried about mis-directing funds, you can view this as a fairly low-cost exercise. You'll affect more than a trivial amount of money (unless we get tons of votes), but it won't be that big; I think the second-order effects (2-5) will outweigh the effect of directing funds (1).
Some other common questions
Why isn't charity X a candidate?
We restricted candidates to the charities on
this list, largely for logistical reasons and vetting capacity, which stopped some charities from being candidates (we might change this next year if we run an election again). If the charity is on that list, it's not a candidate because nobody
nominated it on time. Consider sharing a post about why people should donate to the charity, though!
Why can't people whose accounts are newer than October 22, 2023 vote?
We added this restriction to prevent vote manipulation (we'll also be checking i...