This doesn’t change the “indistinguishable from if I gave X” property, but it is a thing that would have been easy to check before posting.
I did check. As you said, it doesn’t change the conclusion (it actually makes it worse).
Second, point (b) matters. It seems like a bold assumption to assume that EA charities have reached “market efficiency”
I’m >50% sure that it doesn’t fare better, but maybe. In any case, I specified in my OP that my main objection was (a).
Thus, if you actually think one of the “EA” choices at GivingMultiplier is more valuable than the rest, it seems very likely that you contribute more to their work by choosing them to be matched.
Yep, I did mentioned that in my OP.
Did you see anything on the site that actually seemed false to you?
No, I also mentioned this in OP.
Give people an incentive to think about splitting their donation between “heart” and “head”, by...
There’s not really a real incentive though. I feel like there’s a motte-and-bailey. The motte is that you get to choose one of the 9 charities, the bailey is that the matching to the local charity is actually meaningful.
and the local charity of their choice
That’s meaningless as I showed in OP.
If you think they could have been even more clear, or think that most donors will believe something different despite the FAQ, you could say so. But to say that people who use the match “don’t understand what’s going on” is both uncharitable and, as best I can tell, false.
Let’s say that GM has $100 in matching funds to distribute. I like Doctors Without Borders and AMF. You prefer March of Dimes and Clean Air Task Force.
I give a $333/$333 split to my charities. That’s a 50⁄50 split, which gets a 15% match from GM, which equates to $100.
If I get there before you, Doctors Without Borders and AMF both get an extra $50.
If you get there before me and do the same split, March of Dimes and CATF get $50.
Those are different states of the world, determined by which of us gets the match.
If neither of us had used the match, GM would have given $100 to the charity chosen by whichever donor was matching us. That’s a third possible state of the world.
If we assume that GM has limited funding, every person who gets a match is theoretically taking funds for their charities, at the expense of someone who would have used those funds for other charities. If this person likes their charities more than most other charities, they are benefiting in some way.
In theory, you could argue that the original matching donor is hurt, because they lose money that would have gone to a charity of their choice—but they chose to fund a match, likely because they wanted to encourage people to think more carefully about funding effective charities and were willing to “pay them” to do so.
I guess I was working on the assumption that it was rare that people would want to split their donation between local and effective a priori, and my point was that GM wasn’t useful to people that didn’t already want to split their donations in that way before GM’s existence—but maybe this assumption is wrong actually
I did check. As you said, it doesn’t change the conclusion (it actually makes it worse).
I’m >50% sure that it doesn’t fare better, but maybe. In any case, I specified in my OP that my main objection was (a).
Yep, I did mentioned that in my OP.
No, I also mentioned this in OP.
There’s not really a real incentive though. I feel like there’s a motte-and-bailey. The motte is that you get to choose one of the 9 charities, the bailey is that the matching to the local charity is actually meaningful.
That’s meaningless as I showed in OP.
I disagree. shrug
I don’t understand what you mean.
Let’s say that GM has $100 in matching funds to distribute. I like Doctors Without Borders and AMF. You prefer March of Dimes and Clean Air Task Force.
I give a $333/$333 split to my charities. That’s a 50⁄50 split, which gets a 15% match from GM, which equates to $100.
If I get there before you, Doctors Without Borders and AMF both get an extra $50.
If you get there before me and do the same split, March of Dimes and CATF get $50.
Those are different states of the world, determined by which of us gets the match.
If neither of us had used the match, GM would have given $100 to the charity chosen by whichever donor was matching us. That’s a third possible state of the world.
If we assume that GM has limited funding, every person who gets a match is theoretically taking funds for their charities, at the expense of someone who would have used those funds for other charities. If this person likes their charities more than most other charities, they are benefiting in some way.
In theory, you could argue that the original matching donor is hurt, because they lose money that would have gone to a charity of their choice—but they chose to fund a match, likely because they wanted to encourage people to think more carefully about funding effective charities and were willing to “pay them” to do so.
What do you think is wrong about this model?
I guess I was working on the assumption that it was rare that people would want to split their donation between local and effective a priori, and my point was that GM wasn’t useful to people that didn’t already want to split their donations in that way before GM’s existence—but maybe this assumption is wrong actually