Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good points, but I don't think we need assumptions that strong. For example, if democrats donate to the republican party as an anti-charity and republicans donate an equal total to the democratic party, then probably democrats and republicans would all agree that that's strictly worse than nobody donating at all. But more to the point, I'm just viewing it from the individual user's perspective. From your point of vie…
It is useful to distinguish between the individual user's perspective and the global perspective. You want to focus on the individual user, and that makes sense. But to him/her, they're using an anti-charity because they want to increase their odds of accomplishing their goal. So when thinking about whether it is "good for the world" or "bad for the world" that people do this, we have to factor in: 1: the x% probabil…
Exactly zero harm befalls the world in the latter case.
I'd even go so far as to say you could achieve the same effect with a true charity by risking an amount that you really couldn't afford. But, as I point out in the blog post I linked to above, no one ever has the guts to actually do that.
Btw, on Beeminder we very occasionally have people who risk thousands of dollars. I think they tend to be really hardcore fans who may in fact view it as improving the world by giving us money. Hence them shrugging off smaller amounts and needing to risk something ridiculous to stay motivated to stay on track. But it's still super win-win (because they do stay on track overall -- and sometimes staying on track means things like finishing a PhD!).