MIRI Donation Collaboration Station

It seems like one of the biggest issues will be making sure donors know what other donors are doing during this time period, to prevent overfilling of matching funds, to make sure the right number of people try to spike the donation box at 5, and to coordinate Tyler's "split up donations" idea during non-peak hours. Maybe there could be a single comment here that is being edited through the day so donors know what the best thing to do at that time is? (preliminary idea)

For those of us who might not be able to spare $500, but still want to maximize our impact with a couple hundred, will you be posting a finalized strategy at the end for medium sized and small donors?

I'm not sure, but I don't think we will have access to the number of people who donated for all the other charities. And I suspect that something may be wrong in the math, because that strategy of "donate every minute until 2000 donations occur total" would lead to badly overfilling that hour with donations if, say, 1800 donations were made on behalf of all the other charities.

That math looks like you are calculating the expected value of a raffle ticket randomly awarded to one donor with a value of 2000$.

But instead, the 2000$ is awarded to the charity that received the most donations in one hour. So we just have to donate more times than the second most-donated-to charity.

The opportunity cost bound, with the information that Alexi gave, is 200 donations of 10$. If it ever takes more than 200 donations to get the 2000$, more money could have been earned during the 1-1 dollar matching hour.

So I suspect a good strategy would be to pick a set of off-peak hours where few people are donating, and split up the donations during those times to secure multiple 2000$ prizes with a low(ish) number of donations. Maybe use the success or failure of X number of donations during one off-peak hour to estimate how many donations to do during the next off-peak hour?

Of course, all this assumes that the behavior of the other donors conforms to the normal human diurnal cycle. If they are sufficiently crafty, the multiple charities that have this idea and people willing to wake up at 3 AM may make those hours prohibitively expensive.

I doubt it though. Maybe the European Less Wrong readers could donate during those times so those on the west coast don't have to wake up at terrible hours?

And does anyone want to set up a prediction market to estimate the number of donors for the second-largest charity during the 1-6 window?

EDIT: Assuming we do 100 donations of 10 dollars each per hour for those 5 hours, and no other charity can muster 100 donations per hour.... (If we can get the prize for less than 100 donations in one hour, the expected value is greater than donating during the 2-1 matching hour) it should only take ~$5000 earmarked for that time period to get 5 2000 dollar prizes. That looks doable.

Minimum donation is $10.

I asked about this. All scheduled donations don't count towards any of the matching/prizes, so scheduling a donation is not recommended.