Note: This was for April Fools. I'll leave the original top text for posterity, but see the updates for the current state of actual donation lottery.

Greetings, all!

Good Heart Tokens are clearly the mechanism we need to do more Good in the world. To that end, I'm starting a donation lottery.

Here's how it works.

First, strong up vote this post. We need to try to get it to at least $600 worth of upvotes to maximize the payout. (though see update 1; there's no limit)

Next, give an answer to this "question" specifying the charity you'd like to see donated to.

Then, upvote answers. This will generate a weighted distribution from which I will randomly pick the winner of the lottery. So, for example, if there's 1 answer for MIRI that gets 69 Good Heart Tokens and 1 answer for AMF that gets 420 Good Heart Tokens, then I'll do a random weighted drawing where MIRI has a weight of 69 and AMF has a weight of 420. The winner gets the pot of tokens generated by upvoting this post.

You get to do what you like with the tokens on your answer. I think in good conscience you should donate them to the winner (announced in an update to the post the next day), however I have no way to enforce that.

No duplicate answers for the same charity. If you accidentally post a duplicate please delete it. If you don't, whenever I notice it I'll keep only the one that has the earliest time stamp.

Good luck!

Update 1: After posting this I quickly realized there's no $600 cap. From the payments page: "If you receive more than $600 in a year, you'll need to be entered into Center for Applied Rationality's payment system. CFAR will contact you via your LessWrong email address about next steps. (Make sure it's an email that you check regularly)". So up vote as much as you can, the sky is the limit!

To that end I'll be posting some seed answers to vote on since I'm not the bottleneck. All tokens earned on my answers will be added to the donation pool.

Update 2: Okay, so here's some updates in light of the announcement that Good Heart Tokens are extending until end of day Thursday, April 7th, Pacific Time. First, I'm going to just donate whatever amount I get to the winner of the lottery. I'll still subsidize the amount to make up any shortfall in the earnings, but I'm making a couple modifications:

  • I'm upping the amount I'll subsidize to $1000. This reflects the change to a cap of 1000 tokens that can be redeemed.
  • I'm retracting my bid to get the Goodest Heart. This was a fun game for April 1, but since we've been asked to discontinue "fun" uses of the karma system I'll retract that.
  • I'll make the drawing on or after April 8 based on the procedure described above. I'll do this based on the vote values of the answers whenever I happen to look at it. I'll document the values at the time I ran the drawing as well as the outcome. Thus you can continue to vote on the options to adjust the relative weights, however in the spirit of no more "fun" you should only make adjustments to bring them in line with your preferences, not to artificially pump up the number of tokens I'm going to receive to offset my subsidy of the pool (or to try to push the pool to over $1000 and see if we can get LW to pay out).

Update 3: Winner announced!

New Answer
New Comment

9 Answers sorted by

Gordon Seidoh Worley

210

EA Funds - Long-Term Future Fund

Gordon Seidoh Worley

180

Against Malaria Foundation

Gordon Seidoh Worley

130

EA Funds - Animal Welfare Fund

Gordon Seidoh Worley

110

GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund

Gordon Seidoh Worley

110

EA Funds - EA Infrastructure Fund

Gordon Seidoh Worley

110

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Gordon Seidoh Worley

90

EA Funds - Global Health and Development Fund

Gordon Seidoh Worley

90

EA Funds - Even distribution

5 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

I should note I have no idea how real payouts are since Good Heart Tokens are an April Fool's joke. That said, if they turn out to be all fake, I'll subsidize up to $600 (the anchor max amount suggested by the joke) to fund the lottery and make up any shortfall caused by Good Heart Tokens not being exchangeable for USD.

See the updates above.

See the updates above.

Copied from my comment on the post announcing Good Heart Tokens:

So I'm attempting to run a donation lottery off the new system, which is fun. However, it'd also be nice to end up with the Goodest Heart.

I've already promised on that post to subsidize the donation lottery up to the $600 level if it turns out there's actually no money (or I just get less than $600 worth of votes).

However, in the interest of getting the most internet points I can today, if at the end of the Good Heart Token experiment I end up with the Goodest Heart (I'm at the top of the leaderboard) I'll donate an additional $1000 to the winner of the donation lottery.

I'll make a similar comment over on the donation lottery.

To ensure I actually get this, if someone else makes a competing offer to try to get my votes (for example, promises to donate $1001 to the winner of the donation lottery if they end up with the Goodest Heart, or otherwise makes a bid for votes to have the Goodest Heart) and they do in fact end up with the Goodest Heart, I'll instead donate $1000 to whatever charity I think the person who usurps me would most dislike to see a donation made to (that is not a charity that is net-negative for the world in my estimation).

May the voting commence!

I neglected to add the latest update to the lottery as a comment, so anyone following along may have missed it. Adding as a comment now in the hopes interested folks see it:

Okay, so here's some updates in light of the announcement that Good Heart Tokens are extending until end of day Thursday, April 7th, Pacific Time. First, I'm going to just donate whatever amount I get to the winner of the lottery. I'll still subsidize the amount to make up any shortfall in the earnings, but I'm making a couple modifications:

  • I'm upping the amount I'll subsidize to $1000. This reflects the change to a cap of 1000 tokens that can be redeemed.
  • I'm retracting my bid to get the Goodest Heart. This was a fun game for April 1, but since we've been asked to discontinue "fun" uses of the karma system I'll retract that.
  • I'll make the drawing on or after April 8 based on the procedure described above. I'll do this based on the vote values of the answers whenever I happen to look at it. I'll document the values at the time I ran the drawing as well as the outcome. Thus you can continue to vote on the options to adjust the relative weights, however in the spirit of no more "fun" you should only make adjustments to bring them in line with your preferences, not to artificially pump up the number of tokens I'm going to receive to offset my subsidy of the pool (or to try to push the pool to over $1000 and see if we can get LW to pay out).

In case anyone is watching this post, I've announced the winner.

These charities pretty much match my preferred distribution over recipients, so I just strong upvoted everything here. I encourage others to do the same.