However, I worry that in the EA community, there's an overemphasis on the “scout” mindset—being skeptical of one’s own work and too quick to defer to critiques from others.

Perhaps a minor point: the scout mindset encourages skepticism, but not deference. There's a big difference between deferring to a critique vs. listening to and agreeing with it. I think we should hesitate to describe people as deferring to others unless either (a) they say they are doing so or (b) we have some specific reason to think they can't be critically analysing the arguments for themselves.

I think this might merit a top-level post instead of a mere shortform

80k could be much better than nothing and yet still missing out on a lot of potential impact, so I think your first paragraph doesn't refute the point.

Yeah, in retrospect maybe it was kind of doomed to expect that I might influence FarmKind's behaviour directly, and maybe the best I could hope for is influencing the audience to prefer other methods of promoting effective giving.

If you're just saying "this other case might inform whether and when we think donation matches are OK", then sure, that seems reasonable, although I'm really more interested in people saying something like "this other case is not bad, so we should draw the distinction in this way" or "this other case is also bad, so we should make sure to include that too", rather than just "this other case exists".

If you're saying "we have to be consistent, going forward, with how we treated OpenPhil / EA Funds in the past", then surely no: at a minimum we also have the option of deciding it was a mistake to let them off so lightly, and then we can think about whether we need to do anything now to redress that omission. Maybe now is the time we start having the norm, having accepted we didn't have it before?

FWIW having read the post a couple of times I mostly don't understand why using a match seemed helpful to them. I think how bad it was depends partly on how EA Funds communicated to donors about the match: if they said "this match will multiply your impact!" uncritically then I think that's misleading and bad, if they said "OpenPhil decided to structure our offramp funding in this particular way in order to push us to fundraise more, mostly you should not worry about it when donating", that seems fine, I guess. I looked through my e-mails (though not very exhaustively) but didn't find communications from them that explicitly mentioned the match, so idk.

Yes, but then the standard donor doesn't care about having the influence either, right?

oh, I also want to add that:

• I think it's relevant and useful that I noticed the "influence bonus" that the standard donor gets comes from the bonus donor losing influence.
• I didn't notice this at first! But I thought to myself "ok, Jason's argument that the standard donor gets more than $1 of value sounds right, but I know there's only $2 value in the inputs. Where is the extra value coming from? If it's being created, how is it being created?"
• This kind of question really only makes sense if you stand by the "$2 in, $2 out" kind of thinking, so I think this is a good example of why that's a good principle that led me to clarify my thinking and notice something new.

If providing funds that will contribute to a match has the effect of increasing funds generated to effective charities and is transparent and forthright about the process involved, I don't really see the problem.

I think this is a pretty interesting aspect of the discussion, and I can see why people would not only agree with this but think it kind of obvious. Here are some reasons why I don't think it's so obvious:

• I think it's worth noticing when you offer other people something that you wouldn't take yourself. Why is it good for them, but not good for you?
• I think you should include your assessment of what value the deal has to someone else in your assessment of whether you have successfully communicated what the deal is. As above, if people are taking an offer that you wouldn't take, and that as far as you see doesn't benefit them, I think you should take that as evidence that you haven't explained the deal (Jason makes this point in another comment)
• I think a useful analogy is a casino, say a roulette wheel. The rules of roulette wheels are pretty simple, and completely public. People play them willingly, often believing it's in their interests to do so. Yet I think roulette wheels are kind of exploitative and even verge on predatory, and I wouldn't feel comfortable running one even to donate the proceeds to charity. Again, opinions can differ here, but for me I see facilitating and encouraging other people to make decisions that you know are bad isn't ethical behaviour, even if they ultimately make the decision freely and willingly. (To be clear, I think offering a donation match is less unethical than running a casino, but I bring up the casino to illustrate how offering people a free and informed choice sometimes still doesn't sit right with me.)

I do see how this could be adversarial or uncooperative. Do X, or else I'll stop buying medicine for dying kids. What?!

Right, I feel like it's easy to not notice this framing, but it feels pretty weird once you do frame it in that way.

I do agree that there are some circumstances under which donation matches make sense, and increasing marginal returns to donations is perhaps one of them (which is not exactly what you said I think? but similar). I just think these circumstances tend to be relatively niche and I don't see how e.g. the FarmKind case is one of them.