It’s been great to see everyone contributing to the Donation Election, both with your posts and with your donations. If you weren’t finding it exciting enough already, we’re now offering rewards for different donation tiers! There are both individual rewards, and collective ones for if the fundraiser reaches certain milestones overall.
You can donate to the fund here, and you can learn more about the Donation Election in the giving portal or in these posts. Now here's a more detailed description of the rewards:
Individual rewards
- $10: You can add a badge next to your name saying that you donated. This will last until around the end of December when the fundraiser closes. I’ve set this on my own profile so you can see what it looks like[1].
- $50: Someone who is bad at drawing will draw a picture of the animal or being of your choice. This will be a digital drawing[2], probably done by one of the CEA Online team.
- $100: Someone who is good at drawing will draw a picture of the animal or being of your choice (otherwise as above).
- $250: We will draw a portrait of you (or whoever you like) with Giving Season vibes — hopefully worthy of being used as your profile picture here or on other sites.
To claim your individual rewards you can DM @EA Forum Team with a screenshot of your donation receipt[3], saying which rewards you want to claim (i.e. you don’t have to claim the higher rewards if you don’t want them). You can do this even if you donated before these were announced.
Note that we may only do a limited number of drawings if it turns out we get loads of requests, but I’ll warn you here beforehand if it looks like this is going to be the case.
Collective rewards
- $40,000: We’ll make a Forum yearbook photo, where anyone can be included if they want (by submitting a picture or telling us to use your profile pic), and we’ll make this the banner image of the Community page for the next year.
- $50,000: To celebrate this win for democracy with even more democracy, we’ll let Forum users vote for the next[4] small feature we build. This will be chosen from a set of 5+ that we select beforehand. Here’s some that might end up on the list to give you an idea:
- A dark mode toggle on the Frontpage (currently it’s hidden in account settings)
- Forum-native polls
- The ability to mute/block people (so you wouldn’t see their posts or comments, and they wouldn’t be able to message you)
- Reactions on DMs
- The ability to sign up for job ads based on your preferences
- AI generated preview images for posts
- $75,000: To celebrate this huge win for democracy, we’ll let you vote for the next big feature we build. As above this will be decided from a fixed list, and here are some examples of big features we might put on the list:
- Posts private to logged-in users
- Private notes/highlights on posts
- Being able to react (agree/disagree/heart etc) to a specific passage in a post
- An easily accessible page for browsing editions of the Digest (a weekly curated list of top posts)
- A native way to limit your usage of the Forum to prevent doomscrolling
- The ability to set reminders and/or ”snooze” posts to read later
- $100,000: To celebrate tail risk events, we will host a “Lesswrong Freaky Friday”, where we dress up the Forum as LessWrong for the day and all try and act like LessWrongers.
For the vote-on-a-feature ones, please feel free to comment here (or DM me) with features that you would like to be included in the vote, and we’ll include them if they’re popular and the right size.
- ^
For if you're reading this far in the future:
- ^
Unless you happen to come to Trajan House in Oxford in which case you may be able to get a physical version
- ^
You should get a receipt by email, we just need a screenshot of the part that says your name and where you donated to (if you want to remain anonymous you can redact your name to claim the $10 reward, but not the higher ones). Note that to send a screenshot in a DM you have to drag and drop from your file explorer, if you have trouble with this you can instead email forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org from the email you use for your account
- ^
It’s worth noting that it’s already true that we’ll build features that lots of people ask for, so in general if you want a feature please ask. The thing we’re committing to in this case is that we’ll build the winner pretty quickly after the poll closes, whereas the other options will go on the “reevaluate later” pile and might get built eventually
Huge thanks to Lizka for the portrait reward!
Love it!
But why not make the bad drawings NFTs? Its an amazing idea, we can resell them tomorrow for tens of thousands of dollars, and make orders of magnitude more money which we can then re-gift spawning more NFTs creating a perpetual motion money making scheme for good!
This is sure to be a sustainable
ponzi schemebusiness model to drive the success of the Effective Altruism movement into our utopian perfectly aligned AI driven future!Too soon?
(A little unsure if this humor is ok here or not, will happy delete if karma quickly slides negative ;)
I'm starting a thread here for poorly drawn animal rewards. The first is a hedgehog:
My only comment here is that I would not class these as even close to "poorly drawn", heres the "Ugandan Crane"![]()
Lizka made this nice artwork of me! Insofar as The Elephant in the Brain is right, consider this an especially good social signalling donation opportunity :)
At the end, I'd be curious to see a histogram of donation amounts. Specifically, I'm interested in whether the rewards appear to have incentivized people to donate certain amounts.
For purely data-analysis purposes, I wish the thresholds had been, e.g., $13.37, $271.82, or other numbers that were slightly above a traditional, round donation threshold amount. That would have yielded better information about whether people who would have counterfactually donated at the traditional threshold instead donated slightly more to grab the reward. We'd know that people who donated $13.37 were reward-motivated at least in part, and that people who donated $10 weren't. People who donated $15 may or may not have been motivated (they may be motivated folks who have a love of round numbers, or might have donated $15 anyway).
Good idea, we can do this. We'll probably write a retro post at the end and this can be one of the stats we include.
From eyeballing the amounts we have been sent, it looks like the bulk of the pot is made up of large donations (>=$250), and these aren't clustering around the reward amount of $250. I would also guess (based on very little) that, especially for the flair, there is a large second order effect of increasing the general awareness of the donation election and this nudges other people to donate.
Agree re: the likelihood of a second order awareness / social proof impact. An absence of clustering would make me think the second-order effect was the predominant one, which would be useful info for designing rewards for future fundraisers.
Gift Aid related clarification:
Gift Aid is a tax related bonus you can apply to donations in the UK. Apparently the way this works is the money arrives to the charity you're donating to in a big lump from the government some time, possibly months, after the original donations. This means the amount raised (the number here) will likely go up a bit even after the fundraiser closes (on 20th Dec).
For the purposes of the collective rewards here, we will use the amount that is showing on the fundraiser at the time we stop collecting donations. But the actual amount we end up distributing will include any extra that comes through as a result of Gift Aid.