I’m sorry you hear it that way, but that’s not what it says; I’m making an empirical claim about how norms work / don’t 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 ‘no donation matching’, such as ‘no donation matching without communication around counterfactuals’, or Open Phil / 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 ‘no donation matching’, such as ‘no donation matching without communication around counterfactuals’, or Open Phil / EAF needs to take significantly more flak than I think they did.
While I think a norm of “no donation matching” is where we should be, I think the best we’re likely to get is “no donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impact”. So while I’ve tried to argue for the former I’ve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that don’t meet the latter.
If you’re just saying “this other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OK”, then sure, that seems reasonable, although I’m really more interested in people saying something like “this other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this way” or “this other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that too”, rather than just “this other case exists”.
If you’re saying “we have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil / EA Funds in the past”, 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 didn’t have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly don’t 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 “this match will multiply your impact!” uncritically then I think that’s misleading and bad, if they said “OpenPhil 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 donating”, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didn’t find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.
I’m sorry you hear it that way, but that’s not what it says; I’m making an empirical claim about how norms work / don’t 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 ‘no donation matching’, such as ‘no donation matching without communication around counterfactuals’, or Open Phil / 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 “no donation matching” is where we should be, I think the best we’re likely to get is “no donation matching without donors understanding the counterfactual impact”. So while I’ve tried to argue for the former I’ve limited my criticism of campaigns to ones that don’t meet the latter.
If you’re just saying “this other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OK”, then sure, that seems reasonable, although I’m really more interested in people saying something like “this other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this way” or “this other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that too”, rather than just “this other case exists”.
If you’re saying “we have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil / EA Funds in the past”, 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 didn’t have it before?
FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly don’t 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 “this match will multiply your impact!” uncritically then I think that’s misleading and bad, if they said “OpenPhil 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 donating”, that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didn’t find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.