If providing funds that will contribute to a match has the effect of increasing funds generated to effective charities and is transparent and forthright about the process involved, I don’t really see the problem.
I think this is a pretty interesting aspect of the discussion, and I can see why people would not only agree with this but think it kind of obvious. Here are some reasons why I don’t think it’s so obvious:
I think it’s worth noticing when you offer other people something that you wouldn’t take yourself. Why is it good for them, but not good for you?
I think you should include your assessment of what value the deal has to someone else in your assessment of whether you have successfully communicated what the deal is. As above, if people are taking an offer that you wouldn’t take, and that as far as you see doesn’t benefit them, I think you should take that as evidence that you haven’t explained the deal (Jason makes this point in another comment)
I think a useful analogy is a casino, say a roulette wheel. The rules of roulette wheels are pretty simple, and completely public. People play them willingly, often believing it’s in their interests to do so. Yet I think roulette wheels are kind of exploitative and even verge on predatory, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable running one even to donate the proceeds to charity. Again, opinions can differ here, but for me I see facilitating and encouraging other people to make decisions that you know are bad isn’t ethical behaviour, even if they ultimately make the decision freely and willingly. (To be clear, I think offering a donation match is less unethical than running a casino, but I bring up the casino to illustrate how offering people a free and informed choice sometimes still doesn’t sit right with me.)
I think your example of the roulette wheel is illustrative… People know that they are going to lose money in expectation but it is rational for many of them to play because the expected fun they have from a night at the casino exceeds the expected loss. For example if you churn $500 and the average payback is 92.5%, the expected loss is $33.50 and you might have more fun than with other recreational activities that cost that much. Of course, some people may have gambling problems or may irrationally think that they have an advantage. These are the cases that we should be worried about: people who have issues of understanding or volitional capacity.
Similarly, people can understand what’s going on with Farmkind or Giving Multiplier and want to participate, understanding that their choice is benefiting the charities that Farmkind or Giving Multiplier prefer.
If they enjoy and understand the process employed, I don’t understand why one would think that they were harmed or exploited
On the casino example: I agree that a gambler could decide that the expected financial loss was outweighed by the value they ascribed to the entertainment. However, that doesn’t tell us what proportion of people around the roulette wheel fall into that category vs. people with impulse-control disorders or the like vs. people who do not have disorders yet make harmful decisions because they are too influenced by gambler’s fallacies. I would put the burden on the would-be casino operator to prove that enough[1] of their would-be customers fell into the “rational gambler” category before considering Ben’s objection to running a roulette wheel have been satisfactorily addressed.
Turning to the analogy, I think there is considerably more evidence of the “rational gambler” category existing than the “people who truly understand an FarmKind-type match, but enjoy it enough to experience it as a net positive.” A full understanding of the financial realities of gambling doesn’t seem logically inconsistent with deriving enjoyment from it—people like winning even when a win has absolutely zero practical import, and people like dopamine hits. Nor does a full understanding seem inconsistent with valuing that enjoyment at $33.50, which is comparable to what they pay for nights of entertainment they report as having roughly equivalent value.
In contrast, I’m having a hard time characterizing a plausible mechanism of action for the FarmKind scenario that produces some valued internal state (cf. “entertained” in the casino example) without either conflicting with other evidence about the standard donor’s preferences (which charity is their favorite) or being inconsistent with the standard donor having a true understanding of the match (that the only real-world difference from the world in which they directly donated to their preferred charity is more money going to the super-effective charity, with an equal reduction of the amount going to their preferred charity).
While I understand the concern that people might only participate in FarmKind’s matching because they misunderstand it, I believe there are those who could find psychological or strategic value in the process even with full understanding. My main point was that, if participants are fully informed and still choose to engage, then any ethical issues are primarily about ensuring transparency. I disagree with the idea that there’s something inherently wrong with the process itself, as long as there’s no deception involved.
I suppose you are saying that this is a situation where the facts are such that there should be a presumption of the participant being misled. But, arguendo, if the participant fully understands the process and chooses to engage, is there some residual wrongfulness? Because I would think the remainder of the inquiry is a prudential question of whether it has the effect of raising more funds for the effective charities.
[note that this is not about FarmKind specifically. It’s a response on whether encouraging the donor to take a deal that is clearly inconsistent with their professed interests is OK as long as the donor fully understands the arrangement]
I think there is a strong—but not irrebuttable—presumption that the person fails to fully understand the process. Based on the differences in opinion, even the Forum readership seems to not be having an easy go at that . . . and that’s a group of intelligent people whose background should make it a lot easier! I also suspect that relatively few people would go through with it once they had a full understanding. The basis for that suspicion is that it doesn’t make sense with the user’s professed preferences, and the mechanism by which the user would gain enough psychological or strategic value have not been clearly defined. It might be possible to address those concerns, but likely at the cost of making the fundraising pitch less effective than other approaches.
I’d only be willing to tolerate a low number of donors who were not fully informed slipping through the cracks. Part of it is that the org is actively creating the risk for donors to be misled. From a Bayesian point of view, a low base rate for full understanding in the pool of people who tentatively plan to donate would mean that the process for testing whether the person has full understanding needs to have an an awfully low false-positive rate to meet my standard.[1] So the charity would need a robust process for confirming that the would-be donor was fully informed. Maybe they could ask Jeff and Ben to do a video on why the process was illusory and/or misleading in their opinion? After all, it’s hard to be fully informed without hearing from both sides.
After all of that, I question whether you are going to have enough donors completing to make the matching fundraiser more effective than one with a more straightforward pitch. Obviously, one’s results may differ based on the starting assumption of how many potential donors would go ahead with it if fully informed.
Finally, I question whether this approach plays the long game very well. By the end of the understanding-testing process, the hypothetical donor would know that the modus operandi of the matching org is to ask people to engage in illusory matches that the organization knows are inconsistent with advancing said person’s stated preferences. That does not sound like a good strategy for building long-term relationships with donors . . . and long-term relationships are where a lot of the big money comes in.
Suppose only 5% of candidates have the required full understanding and should pass. If the process for confirming full understanding is even 90 percent accurate, I think we’d expect 4.5 correct pass results, 0.5 false fail results, 81 correct fails, and 9 false passes per 100 examinees. In other words, a full 2⁄3 of the passes wouldn’t have the needed full understanding.
I think I may have hidden the question that I was interested in my response.
I understand with your understanding of the motives and interests of the relevant actors, it is unlikely (maybe impossible?) for someone to do the matching process while understanding it fully.
But if that premise is satisfied, for the sake of argument, does that resolve the ethical question for you? Because my main issue was that Ben was suggesting that it would not.
Assuming the fundraiser, object-level charity, and those in privity with them had always acted in an ethically responsible manner with respect to the donor, I think the confirmed-full-understanding premise could resolve the ethical problem.
(I’m hedging a bit because I find the question to be fairly abstract in the absence of a better-developed scenario. Also, I added the “always acted” caveat to clarify that an actor at least generally cannot behave in a manipulative fashion and then remove the resultant ethical taint through the cleansing fire of confirmed-full-understanding. I’m thinking of scenarios like sexual harassment of employees and students, or brainwashing your kids.)
I think this is a pretty interesting aspect of the discussion, and I can see why people would not only agree with this but think it kind of obvious. Here are some reasons why I don’t think it’s so obvious:
I think it’s worth noticing when you offer other people something that you wouldn’t take yourself. Why is it good for them, but not good for you?
I think you should include your assessment of what value the deal has to someone else in your assessment of whether you have successfully communicated what the deal is. As above, if people are taking an offer that you wouldn’t take, and that as far as you see doesn’t benefit them, I think you should take that as evidence that you haven’t explained the deal (Jason makes this point in another comment)
I think a useful analogy is a casino, say a roulette wheel. The rules of roulette wheels are pretty simple, and completely public. People play them willingly, often believing it’s in their interests to do so. Yet I think roulette wheels are kind of exploitative and even verge on predatory, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable running one even to donate the proceeds to charity. Again, opinions can differ here, but for me I see facilitating and encouraging other people to make decisions that you know are bad isn’t ethical behaviour, even if they ultimately make the decision freely and willingly. (To be clear, I think offering a donation match is less unethical than running a casino, but I bring up the casino to illustrate how offering people a free and informed choice sometimes still doesn’t sit right with me.)
I think your example of the roulette wheel is illustrative… People know that they are going to lose money in expectation but it is rational for many of them to play because the expected fun they have from a night at the casino exceeds the expected loss. For example if you churn $500 and the average payback is 92.5%, the expected loss is $33.50 and you might have more fun than with other recreational activities that cost that much. Of course, some people may have gambling problems or may irrationally think that they have an advantage. These are the cases that we should be worried about: people who have issues of understanding or volitional capacity.
Similarly, people can understand what’s going on with Farmkind or Giving Multiplier and want to participate, understanding that their choice is benefiting the charities that Farmkind or Giving Multiplier prefer.
If they enjoy and understand the process employed, I don’t understand why one would think that they were harmed or exploited
On the casino example: I agree that a gambler could decide that the expected financial loss was outweighed by the value they ascribed to the entertainment. However, that doesn’t tell us what proportion of people around the roulette wheel fall into that category vs. people with impulse-control disorders or the like vs. people who do not have disorders yet make harmful decisions because they are too influenced by gambler’s fallacies. I would put the burden on the would-be casino operator to prove that enough[1] of their would-be customers fell into the “rational gambler” category before considering Ben’s objection to running a roulette wheel have been satisfactorily addressed.
Turning to the analogy, I think there is considerably more evidence of the “rational gambler” category existing than the “people who truly understand an FarmKind-type match, but enjoy it enough to experience it as a net positive.” A full understanding of the financial realities of gambling doesn’t seem logically inconsistent with deriving enjoyment from it—people like winning even when a win has absolutely zero practical import, and people like dopamine hits. Nor does a full understanding seem inconsistent with valuing that enjoyment at $33.50, which is comparable to what they pay for nights of entertainment they report as having roughly equivalent value.
In contrast, I’m having a hard time characterizing a plausible mechanism of action for the FarmKind scenario that produces some valued internal state (cf. “entertained” in the casino example) without either conflicting with other evidence about the standard donor’s preferences (which charity is their favorite) or being inconsistent with the standard donor having a true understanding of the match (that the only real-world difference from the world in which they directly donated to their preferred charity is more money going to the super-effective charity, with an equal reduction of the amount going to their preferred charity).
Pondering what “enough” means opens up a new can of worms for sure.
While I understand the concern that people might only participate in FarmKind’s matching because they misunderstand it, I believe there are those who could find psychological or strategic value in the process even with full understanding. My main point was that, if participants are fully informed and still choose to engage, then any ethical issues are primarily about ensuring transparency. I disagree with the idea that there’s something inherently wrong with the process itself, as long as there’s no deception involved.
I suppose you are saying that this is a situation where the facts are such that there should be a presumption of the participant being misled. But, arguendo, if the participant fully understands the process and chooses to engage, is there some residual wrongfulness? Because I would think the remainder of the inquiry is a prudential question of whether it has the effect of raising more funds for the effective charities.
[note that this is not about FarmKind specifically. It’s a response on whether encouraging the donor to take a deal that is clearly inconsistent with their professed interests is OK as long as the donor fully understands the arrangement]
I think there is a strong—but not irrebuttable—presumption that the person fails to fully understand the process. Based on the differences in opinion, even the Forum readership seems to not be having an easy go at that . . . and that’s a group of intelligent people whose background should make it a lot easier! I also suspect that relatively few people would go through with it once they had a full understanding. The basis for that suspicion is that it doesn’t make sense with the user’s professed preferences, and the mechanism by which the user would gain enough psychological or strategic value have not been clearly defined. It might be possible to address those concerns, but likely at the cost of making the fundraising pitch less effective than other approaches.
I’d only be willing to tolerate a low number of donors who were not fully informed slipping through the cracks. Part of it is that the org is actively creating the risk for donors to be misled. From a Bayesian point of view, a low base rate for full understanding in the pool of people who tentatively plan to donate would mean that the process for testing whether the person has full understanding needs to have an an awfully low false-positive rate to meet my standard.[1] So the charity would need a robust process for confirming that the would-be donor was fully informed. Maybe they could ask Jeff and Ben to do a video on why the process was illusory and/or misleading in their opinion? After all, it’s hard to be fully informed without hearing from both sides.
After all of that, I question whether you are going to have enough donors completing to make the matching fundraiser more effective than one with a more straightforward pitch. Obviously, one’s results may differ based on the starting assumption of how many potential donors would go ahead with it if fully informed.
Finally, I question whether this approach plays the long game very well. By the end of the understanding-testing process, the hypothetical donor would know that the modus operandi of the matching org is to ask people to engage in illusory matches that the organization knows are inconsistent with advancing said person’s stated preferences. That does not sound like a good strategy for building long-term relationships with donors . . . and long-term relationships are where a lot of the big money comes in.
Suppose only 5% of candidates have the required full understanding and should pass. If the process for confirming full understanding is even 90 percent accurate, I think we’d expect 4.5 correct pass results, 0.5 false fail results, 81 correct fails, and 9 false passes per 100 examinees. In other words, a full 2⁄3 of the passes wouldn’t have the needed full understanding.
I think I may have hidden the question that I was interested in my response.
I understand with your understanding of the motives and interests of the relevant actors, it is unlikely (maybe impossible?) for someone to do the matching process while understanding it fully.
But if that premise is satisfied, for the sake of argument, does that resolve the ethical question for you? Because my main issue was that Ben was suggesting that it would not.
Assuming the fundraiser, object-level charity, and those in privity with them had always acted in an ethically responsible manner with respect to the donor, I think the confirmed-full-understanding premise could resolve the ethical problem.
(I’m hedging a bit because I find the question to be fairly abstract in the absence of a better-developed scenario. Also, I added the “always acted” caveat to clarify that an actor at least generally cannot behave in a manipulative fashion and then remove the resultant ethical taint through the cleansing fire of confirmed-full-understanding. I’m thinking of scenarios like sexual harassment of employees and students, or brainwashing your kids.)