I'm sympathetic to the effective altruist movement, and when I do periodically donate, I try to do so as efficiently as possible. But I don't focus much effort on it. I've concluded that my impact probably comes mostly from my everyday interactions with people around me, not from money that I send across the world.

For example: - The best way for me to improve math and science education is to work on my own teaching ability. - The best way for me to improve the mental health of college students is to make time to support friends that struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. - The best way for me to stop racism or sexism is to first learn to recognize and quash it in myself, and then to expose it when I encounter it around me.

Changing my own actions and attitudes is hard, but it's also the one area where I have the most control. And as I've worked on this for the past few years, I've managed to create a positive feedback loop by slowly increasing the size of my care-o-meter. Empathy is a useful habit that can be trained, just as much as rationality can be.

I realize that it's hard to get an accurate sense of the impact a donation can have for someone on the other side of the world. It's possible that I'm being led astray by my care-o-meter to focus on people near at hand. I do in principle care equally about people in other parts of the world, even if my care-o-meter hasn't figured that out yet. So if you'd like to prove to me that I can be more effective by focusing my efforts elsewhere, I'd be happy to listen. (I am a poor grad student, so donating large amounts of money isn't really feasible for me yet, although I do realize I still make far more than the world average.) For now, I'm doing the best that I can in the way that I know how.

To conclude, I wouldn't call myself an effective altruist, but I do count them as allies. And I wouldn't want to convert everyone to my perspective; as others have mentioned already, it's good to have a wide range of different approaches.