Scott Aaronson on optimal philanthropy (quoted somewhat out of context):

Suppose you had asked yourself, as a teenager, “how should I live my life so as to maximize my impact on reducing the most widespread, obvious forms of human suffering today, like childhood deaths from malaria?” And then set out, as an earnest utilitarian, to implement your answer? What would the result look like?

It seems clear that your life would look nothing at all like Mother Teresa’s, or that of any other traditional “saint.” But it might look a helluva lot like Bill Gates’s. That is, the best strategy might well be to spend the first half of your career making billions of dollars almost any way you could—stealing other people’s ideas, making deals only to backstab your partners later, locking customers in to buggy, inferior products, whatever—and then to spend the second half giving your billions away, thinking very hard about how to maximize the impact of each grant.