John Huang
Bio
I am an advocate of democracy through sortition. I am also employed as a structural dynamic finite element analyst.
Posts 4
Comments14
>If it's about reducing the influence of large donors, what is the incentive for large donors to participate?
Even large donors suffer from the problem of the time cost in evaluating charities. Imagine there are 100 large donors. Imagine a"democratic lottery", now turned oligarchic lottery, chooses the committee and voter weights based on the amount donated.
The incentive for wealthy individuals to participate is to reduce the huge evaluation costs. The oligarchic lottery can be trusted to on average, statistically represent their personal moral weights, proportionate to the wealth they donate. The small lottocratic committee makes the big decisions, so the large whole doesn't have to make any decisions.
What incentive is there for wealthy people to donate to a democratic instead of oligarchic lottery? Even some wealthy people might believe in equal consideration of other people's opinions, that their personal wealth does not make them better at utilitarian or moral calculation. If so, wealthy individuals can still reap the benefits of the lottery and reduce their personal evaluation costs.
In my opinion the way to improve the donor lottery is to convert them into democratic lotteries. The concept is simple. Instead of one person in control, the donor lottery is now controlled by a small committee, and the charities are chosen using a proportionately representative election system such as single transferable vote or party list.
By ruling by committee, you average out the response and make the results representative of the membership. moreover, rule by committee enables deliberation and information transfer, so that persuasion can be used to make decisions and potentially improve accuracy or competence at the loss of independence.
Rule by committee also has superior connection to "democracy" and therefore make the donor lottery more appealing in a marketing perspective. Democracy is potentially more popular than lottery.
The advantage of membership over meritocratic control is the subjectivity of moral weights. Everyone has different moral weights. For example Dustin Moskowitz might not care as much about insect harm prevention, but that doesn't make his opinion more or less correct than yours.
Donor lotteries, and ultimately any kind of democratic lottery, average out the moral sentiments of its participants and make you more effective than if you acted alone. Rule by committee could increase accurate assessment of member moral sentiment and reduce lottocratic temporal chaos.
I added some sections on counter arguments and cost benefit analysis. I also added data collected from America in One Room experiments to give you a better taste of what deliberation produces.
I also brainstorm on potential programs in global development, and possibilities in randomly controlled trials, to flesh out a feasible action plan towards testing and implementation at least in the small scale.
For example, a possible plan would be to perform RCTs comparing sortition and election with respect to cash handouts in global development. But instead of giving cash to individuals, cash could be given collectively to groups, administered by election, or sortition, or direct democracy , or perhaps a hybrid system combining many different elements.
>Unless you're a conspiracy theorist, you should probably think it more likely than not that reputable independent evaluators like GiveWell are legit.
On what basis? Through thorough and methodical research? Or gut reaction? The research has a significant cost to it. Guts are notoriously unreliable.
Clearly the answer is not to just "Trust Charities", because Effective Altruism claims that they are more effective than other charities.
>(Unless by "leap of faith" you mean perfectly ordinary sorts of trust that go without saying in every other realm of life.)
In the normal capitalist economy, I go to a restaurant. I pay for the meal. The meal is immediately served to me. There is a clear connection of reciprocity. There is a clear indication that the requested service was provided. There is a clear avenue of evaluation. I just put the food in my mouth. That's where the trust comes from. You buy, receive, and evaluate the service through normal use and consumption.
In charitable giving, there is no easy feedback. I give the money to a charity and the money essentially goes into a black void. I obtain no immediate feedback on whether the charity rendered is effective or not, because the services are not delivered to me but to somebody else. I cannot directly observe what the money is being used for.
I mean one huge reason is logistics and uncertainty.
First we must come to the knowledge that yes, children actually are dying, and this death can be prevented with $5000. How do we prove that? How does the average person obtain this information? Well, a charitable foundation says so. Or some famous celebrity claims it to be true. Or some study, which the vast majority of humanity has never read or even heard about, claims it to be true.
Then we need to trust the charitable foundation to faithfully execute the plan to save the child. How do we know the plan will be faithfully executed?
An effective altruist is committed to finding and evaluating these answers. The vast majority of humanity is not. So Effective Altruism has made a bunch of claims, but can't prove these claims in a 5 minute elevator pitch.
In the end then you're just another charity asking for a leap of faith. Some people jump, others don't. If you're not asking for a leap of faith, you're asking for a huge mental investment to verify all the claims made.
The advantage of "reform" vs "lobby" is a potential permanent change in 10% improvement year-on-year. If the decision making is actually superior, then we can expect repeated improvements in decision making and budgeting for all subsequent years.
>I imagine it would take at least several decades to become widespread
Comparing to the pace of change with regards to any world problems, decades-long timespans, yes ridiculously long, are about on-par with many political battles. How long did it take for example to decriminalize marijuana? After 60 years, the fight is ongoing. How long did it take to eliminate lead from gasoline? Leaded gasolines started being banned in 1925, yet it wasn't fully banned until the 1970s to 1990s in the US.
The fact that needed reforms have a 60+ year turnaround is an indictment on the incompetence of the status quo in my opinion. If we care about long term planning, we need something more performant.
Let's imagine a hypothetical new and improved decision making process can reduce the turnaround time from 60 years to only 10 years. What's the cost-benefit of for example, having unleaded gasoline 50 years sooner?
Your calculator is honestly pretty depressing. You don't really get any tax benefits unless you are wealthy enough to donate large sums in the ~$20,000 to $100,000 range.
Imagine the median American, about $50K income, takes the 10% rule in an act of extreme generosity and donates $5000.
His tax reduction is $241, a 3% reduction. Pretty insignificant.
At my income level of only around $100K, the optimal donation strategy would be to hold onto your money until you can eventually save to about $60K, then donate it all in a single tax year. The fact that US tax law demands you play these idiotic games makes me roll my eyes.
Why do you think improving democracy is intractable? None of the highest priority world problems are tractable.
Comparing to the toughest problems, how is improving democracy intractable? Of course, tractability needs to be balanced with importance and neglectedness.
Developing strong evidence that some specific reform (ie maybe sortition) could be a real improvement could be done in the millions of dollars range. That could be cheaper than training your LLM. That's definitely cheaper than fusion power.
What is the value to humanity of learning what kind of governments are best? Even in the short term perspective, the value of an improved government could be trillions of dollars of tax dollars saved. In the long term perspective, every top priority world problem would immensely benefit from enlightened governance.
Sortition as a specific reform might be slightly harder to implement on some political campaign, yet imagine hypothetically sortition yields 10% greater ROI in taxpayer benefits whereas ranked choice or approval voting might yield closer to 0%. Of course we don't know the numbers, and that's a huge problem. Ranked choice might be more tractable, yet it also might be mostly useless.
Yet we don't know, because nobody is doing any testing, there's no empirics and I bet, there's no funding.