As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.
Very late response, thank you for catching this!
As GiveWell says in their post, “Because money is fungible, many gifts will effectively take the place of money that Open Philanthropy would have granted this year.” If the result of me giving $1 is that the same amount of money goes to a top charity, and Open Phil gets to keep $1 extra, then Givewell hasn’t disbursed the marginal dollar I’ve donated—they’ve rolled it over.
Disclosure I still did donate the same amount to GiveWell last year as I otherwise would have—this did just make me consider other options more than I had in previous year.
I think our disagreement may just be semantic, though I also have an intuition that something is problematic with your framing (thought it’s also hard for me to put my finger on what exactly I don’t like about it).
From the link in my previous comment, GiveWell writes: “Our expectation is that we’ll only be rolling over [part of] Open Philanthropy’s donation, and we will direct other donor funds on the same schedule we have followed in the past.”
I chose to accept GiveWell’s framing of things (i.e. that your donation will not be rolled over), but your framing (in which your donation is rolled over) may be equally valid as long as you simultaneously claim that GiveWell will role over a smaller portion of Open Phil’s donation than GiveWell claims it will rollover (smaller by the amount of your donation).
Then again, your framing has the issue that if every individual donor who was still considering donating made your claim that GiveWell would roll over their donation, then this would have been false since the sum of individual’s donations was expected to be more than the amount that GiveWell intended to rollover. Maybe this wasn’t actually an issue though given that it was highly unlikely that GiveWell’s communications about rollovers would have caused individuals to donate $110M (the amount GiveWell expected to rollover) less than GiveWell originally forecasted they would.