What’s the best charity to donate to?

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With our limited budget, this is a question we all think about.

If you have under $10,000 to give, consider entering a donor lottery. It’s now possible to put $5,000 into a fund with other small donors, in exchange for a 5% chance of being able to choose where $100,000 from that fund gets donated. Why might you want to do this? In the case where you win, you can do a great deal of research into where’s best to give, to allocate that $100,000 as well as possible. Otherwise, you don’t have to do any research, and whoever else wins the lottery does it instead.

In short, it’s probably more efficient for small donors to pool their funds, and for one of them to do in-depth research, rather than each of them do a small amount of research. The Centre for Effective Altruism now organises a donor lottery once a year – two of them are open as of this writing in Dec ‘18, and will close on 9 Jan ‘19. You can find out more.

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Ben Todd & the 80,000 Hours Team

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Americans over-praise, Germans under-praise

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The cultural differences. But, we could already guess this intuitively.

To German team members, this kind of American praise often feels exaggerated, inflationary, or simply unwarranted. The Germans fear a creeping self-delusion. Germans simply don’t use terms like “great”, “fabulous”, “fantastic”, “amazing”. At the same time, German team members receiving feedback from Americans often fail to recognize the criticism that may be carefully wrapped in praise. Even though the American managers feel they have been quite clear, the Germans are often not sure what their weaknesses are and how to improve.

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John Otto Magee — Handelsblatt Today

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The ‘beautiful love affair’ between Catherine Deneuve and YSL

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At his fashion shows, Deneuve always sat front and centre in the private clients’ row, supporting her friend and wearing his couture designs, which he made especially for her. The star was his first customer at his new Prêt-à-Porter store, Rive Gauche, when it opened in 1967, and remained Saint Laurent’s muse until his death in 2008.

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Christie’s

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Why Cellular Network Towers Get Disguised as Trees

With the rise of mobile phones in the 1980s came ever more cellular network towers, and, of course, not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) criticisms from nearby residents who saw them as eyesores. Thus, an array of camouflage techniques emerged alongside this expanding technology. Towers were hidden inside church steeples, coupled with water towers, disguised as flagpoles and otherwise made to stand out less in their environments. Of course, there’s not always another structure handy to help hide a tower. So, in the early 1990s, a new idea took root and towers designed to look like trees began to crop up.

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Kurt Kohlstedt — 99% Invisible

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Are Psychopaths Attracted to Other Psychopaths?

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Might be true!

What is the source of the attraction to dangerous people? There is no shortage of speculation, ranging from a drive to feel like a rebel, to a drive to become a celebrity or increase one’s popularity, to a drive for a more exciting and adventurous life, to self-esteem issues typically resulting from past abuse, to the drive to be a caretaker, to the drive to control and have power over a person which can result from dating a person who needs you more than you need them.

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Scott Barry Kaufman — Scientific American

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Digital Islam and the New Sheikhs

Technology and Religion.

Yet, and more significantly for our purposes, the video feud highlights a relationship between technology and religious authority, and indeed how changes in the former can serve to transform the latter. An early 20^th Century Dawah Man certainly would not have been able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and speak directly to the masses at the scale enabled by the Internet. There are, of course, many precedents: from the printing presses that produced Martin Luther’s vernacular Bible to the local access channels that nurtured the Moral Majority; there is nothing static about the nature of religious authority. And while we often associate technological innovations with some form of democratization — as individuals gain the ability to access holy texts in an unmediated fashion, to do their own research, and to theoretically reach their own conclusions — this emancipatory narrative does not capture the complexity of these transformations.

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Suzanne Schneider — The Revealer

To All The Romantic Comedies I’ve Loved Before

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Luckily for me—and for all of us—Noah Centineo’s swoonsome Peter isn’t that kind of good guy. In this respect, the film departs, winningly, from the novel from which it’s adapted. In the book, Peter is that kind of guy—or at least, his boorishness in insisting that “no rom coms” be written into the contract by which he and Lara Jean establish the terms of their fake romance, is a clever feint suggesting we have on our hands a character reminiscent of the insufferable John Thorpe in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In the film, by contrast, it’s Lara Jean who writes in to the contract the condition that Peter must watch Sixteen Candles, while he in turn stipulates that she must watch Fight Club. The mutuality of the agreement sets their relationship on the right terms. The scene in which we watch them—Peter, Lara Jean, and Lara Jean’s younger sister Kittie—watch Sixteen Candles together is all the proof we need that the onscreen Peter has evolved from the Peter on the page.

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Sarah Tindal Kareem — Avidly

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A plant that could save civilization, if we let it

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Besides being edible and nutritious, any super plant would need to tolerate floods and droughts and be able to survive in a wide variety of climates ranging from arid regions in north Africa to temperate regions in northern Europe. Ultimately, Chory’s goal is to breed plants that grow extra-deep roots with lots of suberin for long-term carbon storage. She estimates that if 5 percent of the world’s cropland, approximately the total area of Egypt, were devoted to such super plants, they could capture about 50 percent of current global carbon dioxide emissions.

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Laura H. Kahn — Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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Bitcoin was cool until it sucked

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Suddenly no one seems to be talking about Bitcoin anymore.

As a general rule, things that are practical tend to be neither cool nor fun. This handy-dandy heuristic also provides some insight into why, as Bitcoin became more well-known, as more stuff sprung up around it, and as cryptocurrency in general became a “space” for “innovation,” Bitcoin itself went down the drain. It’s currently worth around $3,500 per coin, which is $1,000 less than the current electricity cost of mining one on your computer. (Disclosure: I own about $50 worth of Bitcoin because I am dumb as shit.)

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Drew Millard — The Outline

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On observing one’s past

An apt one today to observe my past.

Let me share a memory with you. It’s a childhood memory, about an event from when I was around 13 or 14 years old. My father and I are playing soccer together. He is the goalkeeper, standing between the posts, I am the striker, taking shots from outside the box. My dad has been encouraging me to shoot with my weaker left foot, to develop the skills that come more easily on my more natural right side. He throws the ball to me, I control it on my chest, let it drop, and hit a sweetly-timed volley with the outside of my left foot. The ball arcs perfectly towards the goal. My dad moves across to save, although I’m not sure he has it covered, and then the ball thunders off the crossbar. Even though I didn’t score, I have an intense feeling of satisfaction, of executing a near perfect left foot volley, the quality of which I have struggled to reproduce in the intervening years. This memory has a rich phenomenology: it involves visual and motor imagery as well as emotion. Yet there’s an important feature of this memory, which is perhaps not apparent in the way I describe it. As this dynamic and evocative memory unfolds, I see not only my father, the ball, and the goal, but myself too. I see myself in the remembered scene, from the outside, as if someone had filmed us playing together and I am watching the old footage.

Such memories are called “observer memories.”

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Christopher McCarroll — OUPblog