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shokwave comments on What are your questions about making a difference? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I see calls (and I'm sympathetic!) to do things like "work as an investment banker, give lots to charity." My question is: do some good in donating and some good in a career; just don't do evil ("neutral impact") in a career and otherwise optimise for big donations; or optimise career entirely for money, regardless of goodness, and make it up and more in huge donations?
(It seems to me that donating offers much more potential "good" than career, but are there careers that have significant potential "bad", such that it might outweigh even millions of dollars of donations?)
There must be some, and it we'd certainly like to investigate which areas of industry are the most harmful. But in general, it's pretty hard for a career to result in the deaths of 600 people, which is a lower bound for what you could do with $1m (you could also fund SI for 1-2 years...). The most common harmful careers seem to inflict economic damage, and since the average dollar is spent on stuff which produces much less welfare than malaria nets or catastrophic risk research, you have to do a lot of it to outweigh your donations, like maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Of course, doing lots of harm with your career might still be ethically impermissible. There's also some tricky questions regarding the long term compounding benefits of economic growth.
I've opted for the second option, finding it easier to engage my natural laziness than stay motivated in any particular direction.