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.
Since the discussion on this thread, I've had the view that the meat-eater problem is dwarfed by the cause prioritisation problem, in the sense that if you give money to a global health and development charity, overwhelmingly the biggest harm to animals is that you didn't give that money to animal welfare charities: the actual negative effect of your donation is likely very small by comparison.
(There's obviously an act-omission difference here, but I don't personally find that an important difference.)
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.
oh, I also want to add that:
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 feel like you're making this sound simple when I'd expect questions like this to involve quite a bit of work, and potentially skills and expertise that I wouldn't expect people at the start of their careers to have yet.
Do you have any specific ideas for something that seems obviously missing to you?