Please list your life hacks.

[reddragdiva]

I would like you to list your life hack du jour. The one you're quite pleased with at this moment.

All sizes welcome — small ones ("I've taken you off my DreamWidth reading list, thus saving a small amount of time") to large ones ("I have discovered a potentially quite useful procedure called the scientific method"). I don't care if it's strictly temporary or a programme to change your life.

Mine: Intarweb in batches. Switch off GMail instead of living in it. Second day, going well, not missing anything that was worth catching. This is giving me time to ask "WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?" and have a mid-life crisis in a reasonably productive manner, between entertaining a toddler.

Please do spread this message, gathering a few would be of great interest.

yes, ciphergoth, this was inspired by you

Comments

Re: Thanks for the inspirational post

[ciphergoth]

Yes, I do.

When you say it fails to match observed reality, what do you mean? That's all I meant to ask. I do mean to address what you write - I just want to get clarity on that point first.

Re: Thanks for the inspirational post

[jeshyr]

I was thinking about this too, and the fact that it fails to match observed reality so I'm going to jump in here. I trust RDD will bop me on the head if he doesn't want more discussion about this.

Fails to match observed reality = it's not what people do. If it was what people did, charities wouldn't bother advertising past the point where potential donors had heard they existed.

Here's my beef:

If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity.

Nobody giving to charity cares only about the recipients. We'd rather think we did, but it's demonstrably not the case. If we cared only about the recipients, we'd set up our bank accounts to automatically give to charity (or, more efficiently, salary sacrifice it) and tell the charity not to send us any updates about the state of the charity except perhaps their annual financial report (so we could make sure their admin costs weren't escalating). Do you know anybody who gives only ever to charity via that method?

Charity doesn't work like that - with almost no exceptions, charitable giving is more successful the closer you can get to a 1:1 correspendence between giver and recipient. This is why people pick a village or a child to sponsor, and why people use Kiva and other microlenders - even though we know rationally that our money goes into some big pool that's then given out basically like any non-personalised giving, it helps us emotionally to feel more warm and fuzzy to feel like we're giving to a specific person or a specific village or something.

It's psychologically easier to relate to a small group that a large one, and easier to relate to a single person/family than to a group, so this makes sense. I can't usefully empathise with "all poor people" but I can empathise with a single family in Vietnam who want to borrow money to buy a sewing machine so they can earn money to send their kids to school.

That's why charity isn't a zero-sum game. If I give $100 to the cancer society it's probably because I can empathise with their poster-child-of-the-month who's stuck in hospital, not because I want to cure all cancer everywhere (no matter what I tell myself about it being the latter). It's not rational, it's emotional.

I know from observing myself, even though I try to be rational, that when I'm lending money via Kiva to individual lenders I give more than when I'm just giving an amount to microlending in general (nb: I never withdraw from Kiva, so that distinction isn't relevant). I know that I likely to donate something to STREAT because I know the people who run it, even though I decided earlier that day I didn't have any money to give to World Vision.

Giving some change to help a remote village get access to clean water isn't just about economics for the givers, and telling ourselves it is is probably self delusion. In my opinion, anybody who says the care only about the recipients and don't get one jot of warm fuzzy for themselves is either kidding themselves or a psychopath. And, yanno, generally the former :).

r

Re: Thanks for the inspirational post

[jeshyr]

Aaaaaand I googled "psychology of charitable giving" and apparently I'm only half right:

<http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/haiti-and-the-psychology-of-ch.html>

Interesting read, and fairly short.

r

Re: Thanks for the inspirational post

[ciphergoth]

Right, the psychology of charitable giving is fascinating and incredibly complicated and contradictory. But I don't think Diva can mean "this article is a very poor model of the way people actually give", because after all the article is all about the contrast between the way that people actually give and the way a rational giver whose only concern was the recipients would give.