My friend Zach introduced me to the idea of effective altruism (EA) during a walk in Hyde Park sometime in Summer 2020. I told him that, frankly, I felt too lucky with the hand I was dealt. So many things came to me through luck: living in the free world, access to healthcare and education, insulation from violent conflict, a loving family. I didn't do anything to deserve this, and it gave me a sense of guilt when I thought about it too much. Arguably the only "real" problems I had faced were losing my mom to an aggressive brain tumor and seeing my younger sister fight (and survive) childhood leukemia — both of which are somewhat secondhand, I guess.

What does a good life look like for those of us who enjoy these fortunes? I don't think the answer involves using our fortune to pay for an increasingly extravagant lifestyle, nor do I think we need apologize or feel guilty for the circumstances into which we were born. After my conversation with Zach and many hours of subsequent reading, listening, and thinking, I am comfortable with the completely unoriginal conclusion that giving is a critical part of what it means to live a good life.

More than that, I have found myself convinced by Peter Singer, William MacAskill, Julia Galef, and Sam Harris that so-called "effective altruism" is a fantastic lens through which to view our giving.

There are a lot of resources out there. Here are a couple:

• Doing Good, a conversation between Sam Harris and William MacAskill on the Making Sense podcast.
• The Life You Can Save, a book written by Peter Singer (and the charity he founded with the same name).
• Givewell, a charity focused on saving the most lives per dollar. They even have the guts to publish a page entitled "Our Mistakes", which analyzes past errors in running the charity and what they've done to correct them.
• As usual, the Wikipedia page provides a great summary of the topic.

As I mention on the computing page, I use and enjoy quite a lot of free software. To quote the homepage of the FSF:

Free software means that the users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price.

Sometimes people use the term "open-source software" (OSS) interchangeably. I'm ambivalent as to whether waters down the goals of free software. Indeed, sometimes OSS licenses do place restrictions on the freedoms enumerated above, so they aren't truly interchangeable.

Anyway.

I get a lot of value from these programs, as do many of my peers and their employers. Of course, we can continue to pull down the source code, ./configure && make && make install, and go about our business, but I think we can do better.

I give regularly to the FSF (which funds the GNU proect) and some individual developers on GitHub. I don't know the magic formula, but I think those who are putting their software out there – licensed for anyone to run, edit, and share – are most deserving of some extra monetary appreciation.