The authors are claiming that anything that helps the far future can also be accomplished by helping people in the present.

This is in tension with "We Are Not in a Position to Predict the Best Actions for the Far Future", isn't it?

I would guess that some of the welfare benefits of democracy and human rights both flow from and flow to greater economic prosperity, so holding those things constant may suppress some of the "true" effect.

Is there anything interesting about supporting different currencies here? E.g. if I pledge to give $25 per month, but I'm actually likely to donate in £, do you tell me a dollar amount and ask me to convert it at time of donation? If so, do you need me to submit evidence of the FX rate in addition to evidence of the donation? Or perhaps you could ask me for my preferred currency, and send me pre-converted amounts when it comes time to do the donations?

you could look at 10 analogous industries, see what processes or institutions are valuable

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?

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.