Another relevant post is Paul Christiano’s Repledge++, which suggests some nice variations. (It might still be worth going with something simple to ease communication, but it seems good to consider options and be aware of concerns.)
As one potential problem with the basic idea, it notes that
I’m not donating to politics, so wouldn’t use it.
isn’t necessarily true, because if you thought that your money would be matched with high probability, you could remove money from the other campaign at no cost to your favorite charity. This is bad, because it gives people on the other side less incentive to donate to the scheme, because they might just match people who otherwise wouldn’t have donated to campaigns.
A possible solution is to send only half of any matched money to charity. Then, from an apolitical altruist’s perspective, donating $100 to the platform would cause at most $100 extra to go to charity, and less if their money doesn’t end up matched. (On the other hand, this still leaves the problem of s slightly political altruist, who cares somewhat about politics but more about charity; I don’t know how to solve this problem.)
And yeah, we’ve run into Repledge++ and are trying a small informal trial with it right now!
Another relevant post is Paul Christiano’s Repledge++, which suggests some nice variations. (It might still be worth going with something simple to ease communication, but it seems good to consider options and be aware of concerns.)
As one potential problem with the basic idea, it notes that
isn’t necessarily true, because if you thought that your money would be matched with high probability, you could remove money from the other campaign at no cost to your favorite charity. This is bad, because it gives people on the other side less incentive to donate to the scheme, because they might just match people who otherwise wouldn’t have donated to campaigns.
Yeah, I agree this would be bad. I talk a bit about this here: https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/incentives-in-the-election-charity-platform/
A possible solution is to send only half of any matched money to charity. Then, from an apolitical altruist’s perspective, donating $100 to the platform would cause at most $100 extra to go to charity, and less if their money doesn’t end up matched. (On the other hand, this still leaves the problem of s slightly political altruist, who cares somewhat about politics but more about charity; I don’t know how to solve this problem.)
And yeah, we’ve run into Repledge++ and are trying a small informal trial with it right now!