Thanks for the feedback!

I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don't think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I'm enthusiastic about the charity, it's strange to be (effectively) playing against it -- especially if there's a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it.

That's a good point. Maybe it'd be better if it were like one team of humans against another. Although I could also see it being the case that people are in fact motivated to win: competitiveness, social pressure, not enough money to be particularly driven to have it donated to the charity.

find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins

That sounds difficult.

A friend of mine from the local LessWrong meetup created Democracy Chess - a game where the human players play against an AI, vote on moves, and the move with the most votes is played. Yesterday a bunch of us gave it a try.

In brainstorming how it could be better I had an interesting thought: what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?

I could see something like that being fun. Having something at stake can make games more fun. And along the lines of charity runs, it can be fun to get together with a group of people and raise/donate money for a cause.

My angle here is that if something like this is genuinely fun and appealing, it could be a good way to generate money for charities. Along the lines of 1,000 True Fans, if 1,000 people spend $200/year on this (~$20/month) and won half the time, that'd be $100k in charitable donations a year. A meaningful sum.

I don't think Democracy Chess would be the ideal game. I think something like trivia would make more sense. Something that has more mass appeal and is more social. Trivia is particularly appealing since it'd be easy to build an prototype for.

One thing I like about this idea is that customer acquisition seems straightforward. I think direct outreach to EA and rationalist groups would make sense as an initial target audience. From there it seems plausible that other groups might be interested. For example, a local bike advocacy group might want to organize a trivia game where donations would go to a pro-biking organization. And direct outreach to such groups is very doable.

Longer term I could see celebrities promoting it. Maybe motivated by altruism, maybe motivated by virtue signaling, maybe a mix of both.

But I'm not feeling optimistic about this idea. The 6+ people I asked from the Portland rationality meetup weren't excited about it and wouldn't be motivated enough to organize a game. Maybe they'd join in if someone else organized it. And I myself fall into that boat: I'd tag along if someone else organized it but I wouldn't be very motivated to organize a game. And I think for this to work it'd require people who are excited and motivated enough to organize games on a recurring basis.

Maybe those people are out there though! Does anyone reading this fall into that camp?

That makes sense. Yeah from what I understand spices vary in how much time they can spend being sauteed. Ground spices have more surface area exposed and so will burn faster.

I've heard and experienced that freshly ground spices are notably better than pre-ground. It's relatively easy to do in a mortar and pestle or with a spice grinder. And sometimes it's good to dry roast them before grounding in order to "wake them up".

Yes, that visual diagram is very helpful. Thank you! I think I mostly get it now.

Hm. I think that all makes sense.

Now I'm wondering whether specificity can be measured in a sort of absolute sense rather than in a relative sense.

You mention that sunny day is more specific than day because it adds weather. Or as others have mentioned, because the set of points it includes is a subset of the set of points that day includes.

But what about the concept of "pizza that is warm, has an exterior that is thin and crispy, an interior that is warm, chewy, and fresh, a thin layer of tomato sauce that is mildly sweet and acidic, and small dollups of fresh mozzarella cheese that is cool and soft"? Can we say that this pizza concept is specific? That it's more specific than day or even sunny day, despite being distant in Thingspace from the day and sunny day concepts?

Intuitively the answers to those questions seem to be "yes", but I'm not sure why, at least not formally.

Maybe it's about "potential for confusion". If I said "the pizza was good", the good pizza concept is it's easy to be confused about what the concept is pointing too (thick or thin crust? red or white sauce?). I suppose this is because there are a lot points clustered together in the good pizza concept.

Alternatively, if I said "last weekend", I used a lot less words than I did in my "pizza that is warm..." ramble, but I still think "last weekend" is quite specific. I suppose because even though I'm only specifying two "things" -- "last" and "weekend" -- the potential for confusion is low. There are only two days "last weekend" can be referring to.

[As mentioned in a linked article, the commonly stated justification was to "lock in the juices", which isn't true, but it wouldn't surprise me if food safety was the actual impetus behind that advice.]

I actually think there is an important element of truth to the idea that searing locks in the juices. This video discusses it.

The idea is that no, searing doesn't lock in the juices that are inside the meat. However, the perception of juiciness is subjective and not just dependent on the actual juice in the meat. A big part of what makes you perceive something as juicy is how much it makes your mouth water, and searing does seem to make your mouth water a lot more.

That's great to hear!

One thing I've heard is that for crispy outsides, after parcooking you want to shake 'em up aggressively so that there's a pasty substance on the outside like in this image. It provides more surface area for browning.

This post from Serious Eats has some other tips that you might be interested in.

There are some other things that I wanted to say but struggled to fit in to the OP. I'll mention them here (in a rather brain-dumpy manner):

• I think an important question is, like, why is it important to understand these things when you can just google a recipe for any given food item you're cooking? The recipe will tell you exactly what to do and following those instructions isn't exactly rocket science.
  
  Well, the words aren't really coming to me here but nevertheless, I'll give it an initial stab. 1) Often times you'll need to improvise and do things different from what the recipe says. 2) Sometimes you might want to cook something without a recipe.
• When I said that this stuff is something you could learn in minutes-to-hours rather than days-to-weeks, I should probably clarify some things. I think a lot of learning does still happen at the days-to-weeks point in the timeline. What I mean is that I think the 80-20 principle applies and that in the minutes-to-hours phase, I expect that a very useful and worthwhile of learning will take place.
• When I propose that the benefit is large, to be clear, it's because I'm multiplying a relatively small amount of utility across a pretty large period of time. When you improve you enjoy your meal a bit more than you otherwise would I don't think that's yielding a massive amount of utilons. But when you eat three meals a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year... it adds up. Technology could end up changing this though.
• Even if you currently are someone who currently doesn't get much utility out of eating, I think that can change for reasons similar to how someone who doesn't appreciate art can learn to appreciate art and subsequently get a lot of joy out of art. And since we eat every day, learning to appreciate food seems plausibly worthwhile. Hm, maybe I'll write a post about that some time. For now I'll note that this path also has downsides. Off the top of my head: being tempted to spend more time cooking than you should, to eat less healthily than you should, to spend more money than you should, not enjoying food you otherwise would.
• I worry that I wasn't clear enough about the fact that I don't think the goals of a crispy exterior and tender interior are as common as... I made them sound? The important point is just that they are relatively common, common enough that if there's a technique for accomplishing those goals, that technique would be worth learning.
• I was hoping to spend more time explaining what exactly the adjacent techniques are, why I think they are adjacent to the reverse sear, and how you might apply them when improvising in the kitchen, but I kinda ran out of steam (no pun intended).

Yes, traditionally people would sear and then put in the oven so the "reverse" in "reverse sear" is alluding to the fact that you're switching the order by going oven first and sear second.

Some other comments:

1. I've never heard anything about the origin of the reverse sear being related to food safety, or better food safety is part of the reason to use it now.
2. Not that Vanvier is saying anything in conflict with this, but since food safety was brought up I want to say that food safety thing with chicken (as an example) is kinda annoying. I think this video does a good job explaining it.
   
   Basically, you want to kill salmonella and other bacteria. The heat needed to accomplish that is a function of both temperature and time, not just temperature. See page 37 of this USDA guide. At 165℉ salmonella is killed instantly. At 160℉ it takes 13.7 seconds. At 155℉ it takes 44.2 seconds.
   
   Conventional wisdom says that you need to cook it to 165℉ to be safe, but that's just the guidelines being dumbed down because nuance leads to mistakes. In reality you can (and probably should!) cook it to a lower temperature if you hold it there long enough.
3. To me, the big reason to reverse sear rather than to the traditional sear-then-finish-in-the-oven is because of the better browning you get with the reverse sear. After taking it out of the oven with the reverse sear, the exterior is nice and dry, and since moisture is the enemy of browning, this dryness helps you get particularly good browning.
   
   The other thing is that for physics reasons I don't quite understand, the reverse sear is supposed to get you more even cooking with less of a temperature gradient. 

This is illustrated well in this Seinfeld clip.