I started out this morning, asking my chosen LLM, well ... this:

The philosophy and subject of "effective altruism" has become some kind of controversial subject, relating to billionaires justifying cut-throat approaches to earning more billions that they can then donate to the "right" causes after they get tired of their corporate overlordship. Hmm ... that was more rant-y than I intended. My point and my question is just, what are quick and easy, reliable, effective ways of figuring out which causes, organizations, open-source projects, non-profits, NGOs, etc, are A) most deserving, and B) most in need. Eg, I have $5/month to donate to a cause ... how do I quickly determine whether that money should go to Wikipedia, Tor, or F-Droid ... or some other org that I've completely overlooked?

My LLM, like most of them, loves the sound of its own voice, so I'll spare you the full response. It did give me some good meta-charity links to explore--

• GiveWell
• Giving What We Can
• Charity Navigator
• The Life You Can Save

But then it spent much of the rest of its answer subtly shaming me away from OpenSource projects and towards charities directly focused on helping people in need. I haven't yet decided how I feel about that.

But regardless, I wanted to also ask real live human beings about this.

Note that I do not want a debate about just how bad is "effective altruism" as understood by the billionaire class, and/or the progressive Left. I am not (yet) willing to relinquish that term to the Bill Gates of the world.

What I do want to talk about, is what that term really should mean (according to me); how do I best decide who to donate money to?

I'm prepared to set up an extra $20/month or $50/month, or some other small chunk of spare change, to support causes I believe in ... but I want to figure out, objectively, which of those causes actually need the money the most, and/or which of those causes are going to put my money to the best use -- as I define it (which is, obviously, a subjective metric ... but still, the metric I care about).

As a brief follow-up on my hypothetical to the LLM ... as much as I use it, I am always immediately inclined to want to donate to Wikipedia, but a bit of digging quickly shows that they're basically doing fine ... meanwhile, if that's the kind of thing you want to donate money to, the Internet Archive is waaay more desperately in need of an extra $5/month from people like me. So I'm looking for ways of finding, you know that guy.