That's a great recommendation. I'll have to give Effective Altruism a look.

Well, yes, helping one's community instead of helping individuals in less well-of areas seems selfish to the point of evil, but at the same time, it's easy to feel like https://xkcd.com/871/. If I volunteer or donate in my community, I can personally verify that something has changed, in a way that I can't on another continent.

Also, I don't personally value the years of my own life that highly. There are plenty of things that I'd happily sacrifice my own life for or rather die than endure, so it makes sense to dedicate some of my donations to helping others avoid those fates.

So yes, rationally, I think GiveWell is an amazing organization and I'm a terrible person for not donating all of my philanthropic work to malaria eradication, but realistically I'm likely to donate more in total if I also find other organizations helping with causes I'm personally invested in.

i am not sure, i feel that helping individuals remotely is sort of like giving people fish instead of teaching them to fish. i'd focus on projects that actually have an impact on a community by helping the community to develop themselves. the best i can think of to help an individual is to offer them a job, but other help ought to be more community oriented. unless you have the ability to actually move to those places and help through building friendship. but that is much harder to achieve.