I would say I have a tendency to go with the crowd, yes, so voting in the same direction that is already there.

Which is the contrary as minding the current voting status as you suggest.

I think this (the first one) is a failure mode.

I would say doing the opposite would be a problem, like upvoting something partly because it has positive karma so "this must be valuable".

I'm not actively doing this nor endorsing it, I just caught myself having this reflex.

Just noticed that I tend to up/downvote and agree/disagree vote more or less depending on what the current vote count is at.

Standard herding bias at work.

Hoping that saying it out loud will make it weaker, and maybe other people can relate.

What I don't like about this is that the mecanism would be unintuitive for many people. Also the vibes are off.

Mutual funds underperform in an environment where arbitrage exists and prices are at least close to efficient.

Indices don't select the "best performing" companies, they usually select the "biggest" companies. Here the analogy to the charity world breaks.

I agree that we don't need to (and usually don't) play those zero-sum games. The problem is that those zero-sum games are the mechanism for price discovery, and we don't have market price signals in the charity world.

I agree with your point about diversification reducing risk. This is true for empirical uncertainty and for value uncertainty sometimes. If you have a convex utility function, reducing risk has positive expected value, if not, then no.

This reminds me of Simplex Architecture, which seems well established in the literature. 

And projecting onto a convex body is alright I guess but doesn't need to be the best depending on the application.

I don't see how this could work.

Investing in an index benefits from prices being good proxies for expected returns, because bringing information to the market is rewarded.

In a liquid market, buying pushes prices up, and selling pushes them down, so if something is mispriced it can be arbitraged away for a profit.

In charity, this is not happening. If research shows that charity A is 10x effective charity B (even with error bars), people don't switch until the prices (aka impact per unit funding) equalize, so the price signal that is useful for index investing is not there.

Hi, welcome to the EA Forum. It's nice to see philosophical ideas that don't come from the dominant tradition here.

Your argument rests on the premise that everyone (human) has liangzhi but large models don't.

I'm skeptical of that, because the innate sense of right/wrong can be culture dependent, and there are people with neurological and psychological conditions that don't have that same experience.

How does that fit into your worldview?

Nice. I don't think it's perfect but it's mostly in the right ballpark.