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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Even when their matching donation is anonymous and the direct influence is zero, the orphan crushing facility wants the orphanage to be successful.

The orphanage's rising success serves to limit the supply of orphans. This means that there aren't as many free-roaming orphans available for crushing as more of them get taken off of the market.

This improves the supply-and-demand ratio for orphan-derived products. A successful orphanage means that the the orphan crushing facility can make more money while doing less of that tedious work of -- you know -- crushing orphans.

(I don't know what kind of secondary or tertiary games could be played with anonymous matching donations to archive.org; my creativity has limits. But I do know that my support for enabling people to make informed personal decisions is approximately boundless, as anything less would be stifling.)

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Maybe I misunderstand the analogy, but in this scenario it seems that the orphan crushing facility's donations to the orphanage are an unalloyed good. Their motives are bad, and they are bad, but their donations to the orphanage are causing more orphans to be taken care of and fewer orphans to be crushed.

Personally, my worry about anonymous donation matching would be that the anonymous (to me) funder is influencing the recipient (to whom their identity is known), and without knowing who they are I can't know the nature of this influence or whether it should cause me to reconsider my support. But I don't see any extra reason to care about anonymous donation matching in particular, as distinct from any other funding whose source is opaque to me.

Oh. Right. You just introduced the concept of non-anonymous (to the orphanage) matching funds. I didn't think of that.

More money for the orphanage means more orphans can be taken in. That's good, right? But since the extra funds are not anonymous (to the orphanage), then it can come with influence on policies.

Policies like: All orphans are now accepted up to a certain age regardless of circumstance, and all orphans now get kicked out at age 12 regardless of ongoing need.

The stated reason is that the orphanage only has so many resources, and little kids need a lot more care than 12-year-olds do. So a line must be drawn somewhere, and that line is at age 12.

It's a popular policy: After all, when given binary choice, everyone would rather see a 3-year-old be taken good care of than a 12-year-old. Think of the little children!

For the orphan crushing facility that helped to impart this policy with their very generous policy-adjustment matching funds, that's a solid win: The orphanage now acts as a livestock kennel where orphans grow in size. There's still fewer of them coming out the far end, but they're bigger than they were before and are now much easier to process in bulk.

People know about the orphan crushing facility. They know they can't do anything about it; it just looms over there like any other dark fact of life. But the streets aren't full of roaming herds of abandoned kids anymore at all, so folks logically conclude that the 12-and-out policy must be working.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I think in this hypothetical, the existence of an orphan-crushing industry should make you reluctant to donate to orphanages regardless of who's doing the donation matching.

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