Iâm sorry you hear it that way, but thatâs not what it says; Iâm making an empirical claim about how norms work /â donât work. If you think the situation I describe is tenable, feel free to disagree.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
I hoped pointing that out might help focus minds, since the discussion so far had focused on the weak players not the powerful ones.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
While I think a norm of âno donation matchingâ is where we should be, I think the best weâre likely to get is âno donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impactâ. So while Iâve tried to argue for the former Iâve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that donât meet the latter.
If youâre just saying âthis other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OKâ, then sure, that seems reasonable, although Iâm really more interested in people saying something like âthis other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this wayâ or âthis other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that tooâ, rather than just âthis other case existsâ.
If youâre saying âwe have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil /â EA Funds in the pastâ, then surely no: at a minimum we also have the option of deciding it was a mistake to let them off so lightly, and then we can think about whether we need to do anything now to redress that omission. Maybe now is the time we start having the norm, having accepted we didnât have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly donât understand why using a match seemed helpful to them. I think how bad it was depends partly on how EA Funds communicated to donors about the match: if they said âthis match will multiply your impact!â uncritically then I think thatâs misleading and bad, if they said âOpenPhil decided to structure our offramp funding in this particular way in order to push us to fundraise more, mostly you should not worry about it when donatingâ, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didnât find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.
Iâm sorry you hear it that way, but thatâs not what it says; Iâm making an empirical claim about how norms work /â donât work. If you think the situation I describe is tenable, feel free to disagree.
But if we agree it is not tenable, then we need a (much?) narrower community norm than âno donation matchingâ, such as âno donation matching without communication around counterfactualsâ, or Open Phil /â EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
I hoped pointing that out might help focus minds, since the discussion so far had focused on the weak players not the powerful ones.
While I think a norm of âno donation matchingâ is where we should be, I think the best weâre likely to get is âno donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impactâ. So while Iâve tried to argue for the former Iâve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that donât meet the latter.
If youâre just saying âthis other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OKâ, then sure, that seems reasonable, although Iâm really more interested in people saying something like âthis other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this wayâ or âthis other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that tooâ, rather than just âthis other case existsâ.
If youâre saying âwe have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil /â EA Funds in the pastâ, then surely no: at a minimum we also have the option of deciding it was a mistake to let them off so lightly, and then we can think about whether we need to do anything now to redress that omission. Maybe now is the time we start having the norm, having accepted we didnât have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly donât understand why using a match seemed helpful to them. I think how bad it was depends partly on how EA Funds communicated to donors about the match: if they said âthis match will multiply your impact!â uncritically then I think thatâs misleading and bad, if they said âOpenPhil decided to structure our offramp funding in this particular way in order to push us to fundraise more, mostly you should not worry about it when donatingâ, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didnât find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.