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Kevin comments on Applied Optimal Philanthropy: How to Donate $100 to SIAI for Free - Less Wrong
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ING has been offering permutations of this deal for close to a decade. If it was that unprofitable for them in the aggregate, they would have stopped doing it by now.
Okay, this is an example of what counts as relevant evidence, and is easy to substantiate too. (Your second sentence is unnecessary and doesn't follow, though.)
A measure affected by Goodhart's law doesn't lose all its value - schools measure password retention, but kids still end up educated, and so forth. "Accounts created" is a good enough measure to remain profitable giving away ~50 dollars. My comment was intended to get people to realise this isn't a scam; this is intentionally placing yourself in the 'acceptable losses for ING' category.
Schools are different; they have little or no incentive to do well. Lots of people have horror stories of how comically bad their early education was, but how many of those schools went out of business later?
Nevertheless, TANSTAAFL. The incentive here is being paid for in other ways, and you'd need to determine the opportunity costs of that money going somewhere else instead.
There is totally such thing as a free lunch and this post is evidence of such. The incentive is being paid for with the free money ING generates in their magic vaults of fractional reserve banking.
What opportunity cost?
You're confusing me; are you being sarcastic in the first paragraph and your question supposed to imply a knock-down argument against the preceding?
I was being serious but with a mocking tone in the first paragraph.
The question was sincere, I wasn't sure what opportunity cost nick was referring to and especially confused by his use of the word "need". His response cleared that up by making it clear that he was knocking the financial system as a whole, which I agree is insane, yet it somehow continues to work in one of the very real examples of magic in everyday life.
That of all the money devalued by the inflation caused by printing money.