I want to share an idea to invite feedback.
So far, I have only considered it for a few hours.
I'm pitching to create a casino where one can only play with money from their Donor Advised Fund.
The primary motivation is that the casino's profits would be donated to effective charities instead of their default non-EA destinations.
As a second benefit, I hope that it could incentivize people to donate more by allowing them to channel their love of gambling (euphemism for addiction :D) to a good cause.
Some supporting arguments
- Daffy, a modern, cheap, and convenient DAF provider, has an API. It should be possible to let people gamble using their Daffy account funds, so there is no need to solve this whole messy part of the equation (after the gambling session, the balance would be settled between the user-owned DAF and the DAF of the house)
- There are countless online casino software providers, so there is no need to develop much on that side as well
- Unlike regular casinos, our's would be able to operate in all states (because legally it's not gambling)
- User deposits would be tax deductible
- Upwards of 90% of wealthy Americans donate to charity, and about 60% of Americans gamble at least once a year so maybe the user base for this charity is substantial
- The online gambling market in the US is enormous (on the order of 20bn of revenue per year) and is growing.
- Daffy had over ~130M USD of user's funds at the end of 2023 (up from 30M in 2022), so they may have substantially more by now
One way to market this charity is: If you don't have enough money to solve some charitable problem close to your heart, try spinning it up in Roulette/Black Jack/etc. Some people would succeed and brag about it. - Unlike regular casinos, there are no moral qualms about it, in my opinion: every player parts with their money at the outset, and there is no way to "win it back," so I expect no one will lose irresponsible amounts. Furthermore, there is no actual loss - all money ends up in charities anyway
- This would allow people to brag about their charitable contributions in disguise by talking about them as gambling instead. Letting people earn some status points without feeling obnoxious is important: charity auctions are one way to do this. A charity casino could be, too.
This casino could be a platform to teach people about the concept of effective giving
Arguments against:
- Some charities could refuse to accept donations from the casino's proceeds since they would perceive it as somehow harmful to their reputation
I was both a professional gambler and somewhat of a gambling addict, and I think that a more significant part of a thrill comes from account balance fluctuations and the screen blinking in just the right way. The promise of being able to win money for your local school (or wherever most people donate) could provide a comparable thrill
- The vibes of gambling and charitable institutions are very different. Maybe it will be problematic to combine the two worlds, e.g., hard to find a working marketing angle
- Traditional media might misrepresent or criticize the concept (and EA)
- Could damage the credibility of the EA movement if perceived negatively
It sounds a little edgy, but should it be a stopper? I believe not. I kind of enjoy a contrarian stance—it could be good for marketing.
I would appreciate any feedback on the idea, and please reach out if you are thrilled to make it happen.
I am in favor of people considering unconventional approaches to charity.
At the same time, I find it pretty easy to argue against this. Some immediate things that come to mind:
1. My impression is that gambling is typically net-negative to participants, often highly so. I generally don't like seeing work go towards projects that are net-negative to their main customers (among others).
2. Out of all the "do business X, but it goes to charity", why not pick something itself beneficial? There are many business areas to choose from. Insurance can be pretty great - I think Lemonade Insurance did something clever with charity.
3. I think it's easy to start out altruistic with something like this, then become a worse person as you respond to incentives. In the casino business, the corporation is highly incentivized to do increasingly sleazy tactics to find, bait, and often bankrupt whales. If you don't do this, your competitors will, and they'll have more money to advertise.
4. I don't like making this the main thing, but I'd expect the PR to be really bad for anything this touches. "EAs don't really care about helping people, they just use that as an excuse to open sleazy casinos." There are few worse things to be associate with. A lot of charities are highly protective of their brands (and often with good reason).
5. It's very easy for me to imagine something like this creating worse epistemics. In order to grow revenue, it will be very "convenient" if you downplayed the harms caused by the casino. If such a thing does catch on in a certain charitable cluster, very soon that charitable cluster will be encouraged to lie and self-deceive. We saw some of this with the FTX incident.
6. The casino industry attracts and feeds off clients with poor epistemics. I'd imagine they (as in, the people the casino actually makes money from) wouldn't be the type who would care much about reasonable effective charities.
When I personally imagine a world where, "A significant part of the effective giving community is tied to high-rolling casinos", it's hard for me to imagine this not being highly distopic.
By all this, I hope the author doesn't treat this at all on an attack on them specifically. But I would consider it an attack on specific future project proposals that suggest advancing manipulative and harmful industries and tying such work to the topics of effective giving or effective philanthropy. I very much do not want to see more work done here. I'm spending some time on this comment, mainly to use this as an opportunity to hopefully dissuade others considering this sort of thing in the future.
On this note, I'd flag that I think a lot of the crypto industry has been full of scams and other manipulative and harmful behavior. Some of this got very close to EA (i.e. with FTX), and I'm sure with a long tail of much smaller projects. I consider much of this (the bad parts) a black mark on all connected+responsible participants and very much do not want to see more of it.
At least in the US, charity bingo, raffles, etc. are a fairly common thing in some segments of society. I don't think these are generally seen as controversial or problematic, although I also get the impression that they don't raise huge amounts of money per individual event. So I don't think all of the downsides you describe are inherent to the charity-gambling mashup. Whether there is some middle path that brings in significantly more money than bingo at a VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) post without bringing in the pathologies of for-profit gambling is a... (read more)