Another possible intermediate norm would be to discourage talking about donating to one’s employer. This would reduce some of the pressure for bias, some of the conflict of interest, etc., by keeping it secret from colleagues.
It might even be possible to keep it secret from the employer—or visible only to payroll, who would report only how much was donated in total by employees, not by whom.
A disadvantage of this is that it would push against the EA norm of being open about giving. It could even make it hard for employees to talk openly about their external giving, because a conspicuous absence of discussing external giving might mean giving to the employer instead. (That might be circumvented if everyone were giving something to external orgs and could honestly talk about where and why, and they didn’t talk about the amounts they were giving to specific orgs.)
Don’t talk about donating to your employer… how do you think that will play out? “Shh, don’t tell us about where you donated.” I’m not sure how to explain this gently, but ordinary people who aren’t immersed 24⁄7 in EA organizations are likely to view this as an extremely strange and weird thing to do, and it’s worth having a sanity check in cases like this to make sure that your ideas are healthy and robust. You’ll need to make sure that your claims are well grounded in reality and evidence rather than speculation, and to ensure that reasonable people (incl. people other than the average readers on this forum, who have already displayed a penchant for elaborate solutions to nonexistent problems) could see them as reasonable points of view, if you want to propose anything which is successfully picked up by the broader community.
Another possible intermediate norm would be to discourage talking about donating to one’s employer. This would reduce some of the pressure for bias, some of the conflict of interest, etc., by keeping it secret from colleagues.
It might even be possible to keep it secret from the employer—or visible only to payroll, who would report only how much was donated in total by employees, not by whom.
A disadvantage of this is that it would push against the EA norm of being open about giving. It could even make it hard for employees to talk openly about their external giving, because a conspicuous absence of discussing external giving might mean giving to the employer instead. (That might be circumvented if everyone were giving something to external orgs and could honestly talk about where and why, and they didn’t talk about the amounts they were giving to specific orgs.)
Don’t talk about donating to your employer… how do you think that will play out? “Shh, don’t tell us about where you donated.” I’m not sure how to explain this gently, but ordinary people who aren’t immersed 24⁄7 in EA organizations are likely to view this as an extremely strange and weird thing to do, and it’s worth having a sanity check in cases like this to make sure that your ideas are healthy and robust. You’ll need to make sure that your claims are well grounded in reality and evidence rather than speculation, and to ensure that reasonable people (incl. people other than the average readers on this forum, who have already displayed a penchant for elaborate solutions to nonexistent problems) could see them as reasonable points of view, if you want to propose anything which is successfully picked up by the broader community.