How much is a human life worth? Governments routinely spend millions of euros to save a statistical life. Yet some global health interventions can prevent a death for a few thousand euros. The difference is not small — it is often orders of magnitude.

If you would save a drowning child in front of you, does distance matter? Does time? How easy is it, in practice, for someone in one of the richest countries in the world to statistically save a life each year? If we care about improving the world, shouldn't we allocate our resources where they have the greatest measurable impact?

This talk explores Effective Altruism as a framework for answering these questions. We'll look at cost-effectiveness reasoning, heavy-tailed impact distributions (why some charities are 10–100x more effective than others), and the idea of treating doing good as an optimization problem under uncertainty.