Unfortunately “fully counterfactual” is too strong. Good Ventures has a bunch of money that they intend to give to the most effective charities they can, and this is great! But their plan to use the money as clost to optimally as possible means this money can’t actually be swayed very much. Say I give $10 to Give Directly and Good Ventures matches my donation with $10 they wouldn’t otherwise donate this year. If I hadn’t donated, however, they would have kept that $10 to spend in a later year on an opportunity they consider approximately as valuable.
I guess I didn’t make this very clear in the survey write-up, but I was explicitly looking only at whether the match was counterfactually valid for the exact same charity, since that’s what poses the biggest transparency concerns. For instance, in the conclusion I wrote:
One thing that I didn’t look at in this survey, but that merits future research, is another type of “partial validity” in which unmatched funds don’t go to the same charity, but go to another charity, sometimes a quite similar one. It’s hopefully clear that this always happens for foundations, but it’s not clear for private donors like HEA’s anonymous matcher or one’s friends.
This seems to be the phenomenon that you claim (and I agree) is probably true for Good Ventures. But I don’t think it’s as much of a transparency concern if Good Ventures neglects to say that they would otherwise give the money to “opportunity they consider approximately as valuable” next year, than if they were literally going to donate $5 million that year regardless of how much the public donated.
Thanks for pointing this out; I’ll clarify what I mean by “counterfactually valid” in the write-up.
I don’t think it’s as much of a transparency concern if Good Ventures neglects to say that they would otherwise give the money to “opportunity they consider approximately as valuable” next year, than if they were literally going to donate $5 million that year regardless of how much the public donated.
I agree that it’s not as bad, but I’m trying to look at things from the perspective of someone who’s considering someone else’s offer to match. From that perspective there’s not actually that much difference between “counterfactually null match because of precommitment to give $5M” and “counterfactually null match because the unmatched money went to something of nearly equal value to you”.
I guess I didn’t make this very clear in the survey write-up, but I was explicitly looking only at whether the match was counterfactually valid for the exact same charity, since that’s what poses the biggest transparency concerns. For instance, in the conclusion I wrote:
This seems to be the phenomenon that you claim (and I agree) is probably true for Good Ventures. But I don’t think it’s as much of a transparency concern if Good Ventures neglects to say that they would otherwise give the money to “opportunity they consider approximately as valuable” next year, than if they were literally going to donate $5 million that year regardless of how much the public donated.
Thanks for pointing this out; I’ll clarify what I mean by “counterfactually valid” in the write-up.
I agree that it’s not as bad, but I’m trying to look at things from the perspective of someone who’s considering someone else’s offer to match. From that perspective there’s not actually that much difference between “counterfactually null match because of precommitment to give $5M” and “counterfactually null match because the unmatched money went to something of nearly equal value to you”.
Yeah, I think we agree on everything except possibly what “counterfactually valid” should mean.