[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.)
[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.)