I am in favor of people considering unconventional approaches to charity.
At the same time, I find it pretty easy to argue against this. Some immediate things that come to mind: 1. My impression is that gambling is typically net-negative to participants, often highly so. I generally don’t like seeing work go towards projects that are net-negative to their main customers (among others). 2. Out of all the “do business X, but it goes to charity”, why not pick something itself beneficial? There are many business areas to choose from. Insurance can be pretty great—I think Lemonade Insurance did something clever with charity. 3. I think it’s easy to start out altruistic with something like this, then become a worse person as you respond to incentives. In the casino business, the corporation is highly incentivized to do increasingly sleazy tactics to find, bait, and often bankrupt whales. If you don’t do this, your competitors will, and they’ll have more money to advertise. 4. I don’t like making this the main thing, but I’d expect the PR to be really bad for anything this touches. “EAs don’t really care about helping people, they just use that as an excuse to open sleazy casinos.” There are few worse things to be associate with. A lot of charities are highly protective of their brands (and often with good reason). 5. It’s very easy for me to imagine something like this creating worse epistemics. In order to grow revenue, it will be very “convenient” if you downplayed the harms caused by the casino. If such a thing does catch on in a certain charitable cluster, very soon that charitable cluster will be encouraged to lie and self-deceive. We saw some of this with the FTX incident. 6. The casino industry attracts and feeds off clients with poor epistemics. I’d imagine they (as in, the people the casino actually makes money from) wouldn’t be the type who would care much about reasonable effective charities.
When I personally imagine a world where, “A significant part of the effective giving community is tied to high-rolling casinos”, it’s hard for me to imagine this not being highly distopic.
By all this, I hope the author doesn’t treat this at all on an attack on them specifically. But I would consider it an attack on specific future project proposals that suggest advancing manipulative and harmful industries and tying such work to the topics of effective giving or effective philanthropy. I very much do not want to see more work done here. I’m spending some time on this comment, mainly to use this as an opportunity to hopefully dissuade others considering this sort of thing in the future.
On this note, I’d flag that I think a lot of the crypto industry has been full of scams and other manipulative and harmful behavior. Some of this got very close to EA (i.e. with FTX), and I’m sure with a long tail of much smaller projects. I consider much of this (the bad parts) a black mark on all connected+responsible participants and very much do not want to see more of it.
Re #1 - the customers in OPs contemplation would have already committed the funds to be donated and prospective wins would inure to the benefit of charities. So it isn’t clear to me that the same typical harm applies (if you buy the premise that gamblers are net harmed by gambling). There wouldn’t be the circumstance where the gambler feels they need to win it back—because they’ve already lost the money when they committed it to the DAF.
Re #2 - this could produce a good experience for customers—donating money to charities while playing games. And with how OP set it up, they know what they are losing (unlike with a typical casino there’s that hope of winning it big).
Re #3 - for the reasons discussed above, the predatory and deceptive implications are less significant here. Unlike when someone takes money to a slot machine in a typical casino, when they put the money in the DAF they no longer have a chance of “getting it back”
Re #4 - yeah there might be some bad pr. But if people liked this and substituted it for normal gambling, it probably would be less morally problematic for the reasons discussed above.
Re #5 - I’m not really sure that this business is as morally corrosive as you suggest… It’s potentially disadvantaging the gambler’s preferred charity to the casino’s, but not by much, and not without the gambler’s knowledge.
Re #6 - the gamblers could choose the charities that are the beneficiaries of their DAF. And I don’t know that enjoying gambling means that you wouldn’t like to see kids saved from malaria and such.
I think your criticisms would better apply to a straight Profit for Good casino (normal casino with charities as shareholder). The concerns you bring up are some reasons I think a PFG casino, though an interesting idea, would not be a place I’d be looking to do as an early, strategic PFG (also big capital requirements).
OP’s proposal is much more wholesome and actually addresses a lot more of the ethical concerns. I just think people may not be interested in gambling as much if there was not the prospect of winning money for themselves.
At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don’t think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don’t raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don’t think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is an interesting question. My guess is that the relatively low stakes and occasional nature of extant charity bingo & raffles go a long way to explaining why those efforts seem unobjectionable.
I agree that casinos are an evil business, and I would be extremely wary of making people worse off in a hope to “make it up” by charitable contributions.
@Brad West🔸 have already answered point by point, so I’ll just add that I believe it’s better to think of my proposal as a charity, that also provides games to it’s customers, rather than casino that donates it’s profits.
I’d argue that regular casinos are net positive for people without a gambling addiction, who treat is as an evening entertainment with an almost guaranteed loss. The industry preys on people who lost more then they could afford and are trying to get even, and it is not possible case.
I struggle to imagine someone, who would donate more to their DAF that they feel comfortable with because they felt devastated that money went to the charity of not their choice.
I am in favor of people considering unconventional approaches to charity.
At the same time, I find it pretty easy to argue against this. Some immediate things that come to mind:
1. My impression is that gambling is typically net-negative to participants, often highly so. I generally don’t like seeing work go towards projects that are net-negative to their main customers (among others).
2. Out of all the “do business X, but it goes to charity”, why not pick something itself beneficial? There are many business areas to choose from. Insurance can be pretty great—I think Lemonade Insurance did something clever with charity.
3. I think it’s easy to start out altruistic with something like this, then become a worse person as you respond to incentives. In the casino business, the corporation is highly incentivized to do increasingly sleazy tactics to find, bait, and often bankrupt whales. If you don’t do this, your competitors will, and they’ll have more money to advertise.
4. I don’t like making this the main thing, but I’d expect the PR to be really bad for anything this touches. “EAs don’t really care about helping people, they just use that as an excuse to open sleazy casinos.” There are few worse things to be associate with. A lot of charities are highly protective of their brands (and often with good reason).
5. It’s very easy for me to imagine something like this creating worse epistemics. In order to grow revenue, it will be very “convenient” if you downplayed the harms caused by the casino. If such a thing does catch on in a certain charitable cluster, very soon that charitable cluster will be encouraged to lie and self-deceive. We saw some of this with the FTX incident.
6. The casino industry attracts and feeds off clients with poor epistemics. I’d imagine they (as in, the people the casino actually makes money from) wouldn’t be the type who would care much about reasonable effective charities.
When I personally imagine a world where, “A significant part of the effective giving community is tied to high-rolling casinos”, it’s hard for me to imagine this not being highly distopic.
By all this, I hope the author doesn’t treat this at all on an attack on them specifically. But I would consider it an attack on specific future project proposals that suggest advancing manipulative and harmful industries and tying such work to the topics of effective giving or effective philanthropy. I very much do not want to see more work done here. I’m spending some time on this comment, mainly to use this as an opportunity to hopefully dissuade others considering this sort of thing in the future.
On this note, I’d flag that I think a lot of the crypto industry has been full of scams and other manipulative and harmful behavior. Some of this got very close to EA (i.e. with FTX), and I’m sure with a long tail of much smaller projects. I consider much of this (the bad parts) a black mark on all connected+responsible participants and very much do not want to see more of it.
Re #1 - the customers in OPs contemplation would have already committed the funds to be donated and prospective wins would inure to the benefit of charities. So it isn’t clear to me that the same typical harm applies (if you buy the premise that gamblers are net harmed by gambling). There wouldn’t be the circumstance where the gambler feels they need to win it back—because they’ve already lost the money when they committed it to the DAF.
Re #2 - this could produce a good experience for customers—donating money to charities while playing games. And with how OP set it up, they know what they are losing (unlike with a typical casino there’s that hope of winning it big).
Re #3 - for the reasons discussed above, the predatory and deceptive implications are less significant here. Unlike when someone takes money to a slot machine in a typical casino, when they put the money in the DAF they no longer have a chance of “getting it back”
Re #4 - yeah there might be some bad pr. But if people liked this and substituted it for normal gambling, it probably would be less morally problematic for the reasons discussed above.
Re #5 - I’m not really sure that this business is as morally corrosive as you suggest… It’s potentially disadvantaging the gambler’s preferred charity to the casino’s, but not by much, and not without the gambler’s knowledge.
Re #6 - the gamblers could choose the charities that are the beneficiaries of their DAF. And I don’t know that enjoying gambling means that you wouldn’t like to see kids saved from malaria and such.
I think your criticisms would better apply to a straight Profit for Good casino (normal casino with charities as shareholder). The concerns you bring up are some reasons I think a PFG casino, though an interesting idea, would not be a place I’d be looking to do as an early, strategic PFG (also big capital requirements).
OP’s proposal is much more wholesome and actually addresses a lot more of the ethical concerns. I just think people may not be interested in gambling as much if there was not the prospect of winning money for themselves.
At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don’t think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don’t raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don’t think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is an interesting question. My guess is that the relatively low stakes and occasional nature of extant charity bingo & raffles go a long way to explaining why those efforts seem unobjectionable.
I appreciate your take @Ozzie Gooen.
I agree that casinos are an evil business, and I would be extremely wary of making people worse off in a hope to “make it up” by charitable contributions.
@Brad West🔸 have already answered point by point, so I’ll just add that I believe it’s better to think of my proposal as a charity, that also provides games to it’s customers, rather than casino that donates it’s profits.
I’d argue that regular casinos are net positive for people without a gambling addiction, who treat is as an evening entertainment with an almost guaranteed loss. The industry preys on people who lost more then they could afford and are trying to get even, and it is not possible case.
I struggle to imagine someone, who would donate more to their DAF that they feel comfortable with because they felt devastated that money went to the charity of not their choice.