Mathematics and saving lives

As someone who gave up a career in medicine in order get a doctoral degree in Causal Inference, I am half-upvoting this, because I really want it to be true :-)

I originally trained as a medical doctor, but came to the conclusion that what I was doing had almost no value on utilitarian grounds. Sure, once in a while you feel good about helping a patient, but really, if you weren't working that day, somebody else would have done the same thing. I decided I would rather have my one-in-a-thousand chance of coming up with an original idea with real impact, instead of spending the rest of my career as a doctor, where my utilitarian impact would almost certainly be negligible.

I came to the Harvard School of Public Health intent on going into academic Global Health, but after I took an introductory course on applied causal inference with some basic DAG theory, that all changed. Partly, this was because I recognized the importance of Causal DAGs from reading Less Wrong. I ended up staying at HSPH to get a doctoral degree with some of the leading researchers in the field; this even allowed me to take a course that Ilya was a Teaching Assistant for (I ended up being a TA for the same course the following year)

Currently, my career plan is to get a faculty job at some school of public health, where I see my mission as taking part in a "reboot" of epidemiology and comparative effectiveness research, to cleanse it of the cargo cult science and magical thinking that is currently all too common, and train investigators in rigorous causal reasoning. I honestly believe that this could have a major utilitarian impact, because in the absence of randomized trials, proper causal reasoning about observational data is the only way we can learn how to make better clinical decisions that optimize patient outcomes,

( Hopefully, if I play my cards right, this career choice will also have the added benefit of giving me sufficient status in the medical community to get a real discussion started on some of the most horrific things that doctors do to patients)

Never forget the power of marginal contribution. Instead of becoming a doctor you can help several people at the edge of becoming a doctor. Even if this happens only once you are already more successful than by becoming a doctor yourself.

Of course, if a lot of people are already doing this. you need to find something else to do.

This may be good advice when the socially-beneficial job in question is something less expensive than medicine. But doctors are expensive. Most of us can't afford to pay for someone else to be a doctor.

But, still, let's consider someone whose skills and interests do make it feasible for them to do so. Let's say they could work as a doctor (earning, let's say, $150k/year, and perhaps costing $200k/year "fully loaded" -- for the avoidance of doubt, all numbers here are completely made up) or as some kind of financial analyst (earning, let's say, $350k/year). After tax, perhaps our hypothetical financier is getting $240k/year, which means they could pay for a doctor and have $50k/year left over. Alternatively, they could be a doctor and take home ~$110k/year.

I repeat that all these numbers are made up (except that I checked the rough relationship between pretax and posttax income). But the overall point is pretty clear: the person we considered could pay for someone else to be a doctor, but only by taking a much better-paid job and ending up paid much less. They'd have to enjoy finance a lot more than medicine for this to be a good trade.

On the other hand, they probably can do more good by picking some job that suits them and pays well, and giving (say) 20% of their income to an effective charity. But it probably won't be (either directly or indirectly) by paying other people to be doctors.

When working on crypto I'm not sure whether you are more likely to kill people by breaking an encryption algorithm or rescue people by fixing something.

Certainly Godel didn't think of saving lives when working out his [in]completeness theorems.

I don't see how he did safe lives by working on them. Could you explain?

Quite possibly. Do you have ideas about which math specialties and/or which problems are more likely to have a big effect?