My objection is not primarily to what Effektiv-Spenden itself published but to the motivation that Sebastian Schienle articulated in the comment I was replying to. As I said there are potentially good reasons to publish such research, I just think “trying to appeal to people who don’t currently care about global effectiveness and hoping to redirect them later” is not one of them.
(I think ideally Effektiv-Spenden would do more to distinguish this from other cause areas, “beta” seems like an understatement, but I wouldn’t ordinarily criticize such web design decisions if there weren’t people here in the comments explicitly saying they were motivated by manipulative marketing considerations.)
“Manipulative” does not seem an apt description to me. Sebastian Schienle wrote:
So hopefully, the current focus provides a good entry point for donors who are new to effective giving whom we can then guide to the place where money goes furthest towards the goal of defending democracy, once such recommendations are available, as well as to other cause areas.
We are up front on our website about in the future probably giving money to organisations outside of Germany from this fund. With regard to other cause areas, I don’t see anything dishonest about hoping that donors will look at other cause areas after entering through a specific one.
My objection is not primarily to what Effektiv-Spenden itself published but to the motivation that Sebastian Schienle articulated in the comment I was replying to. As I said there are potentially good reasons to publish such research, I just think “trying to appeal to people who don’t currently care about global effectiveness and hoping to redirect them later” is not one of them.
(I think ideally Effektiv-Spenden would do more to distinguish this from other cause areas, “beta” seems like an understatement, but I wouldn’t ordinarily criticize such web design decisions if there weren’t people here in the comments explicitly saying they were motivated by manipulative marketing considerations.)
“Manipulative” does not seem an apt description to me. Sebastian Schienle wrote:
We are up front on our website about in the future probably giving money to organisations outside of Germany from this fund. With regard to other cause areas, I don’t see anything dishonest about hoping that donors will look at other cause areas after entering through a specific one.