I knew this canned rebuttal was coming and almost addressed it in my previous comment.

I've not found this to be true at all, for a variety of reasons. One of my moral principles that extreme wealth accumulation by any individual is ultimately harmful to society, even for those who start with altruistic values. Money is power, and power corrupts.

Also, the further from my immediate circle I focus my impact on, the less certainty I have that my impact is achieving what I want it to. I've worked on global projects, and looking back at them those are the projects I'm least certain moved the needle in the direction I wanted them to. Not because they didn't achieve their goals, but because I'm not sure the goals at the outset actually had the long term impact I wanted them to. In fact, it's often due to precisely what we're talking about in this thread: sometimes new things come along and change everything.

The butterfly effect is just as real with altruism as it is with anything else.

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0x3f 3 days ago | parent [-]

But you're not supposed to accumulate the wealth, you're supposed to forward it to your elected causes.

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anticorporate 2 days ago | parent [-]

Being a quant is inherently accumulating and growing someone's wealth for them, even if it's not your own.

If there were a way to be a true Robin Hood and only extract wealth from the wealthy and redistribute that to poor, I'd call that a noble cause, although finance is not my field (nor is crime, for that matter) so it's not for me.

My chosen wealth multiplier is working at a community-owned cooperative, building the wealth for others directly.

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0x3f 2 days ago | parent [-]

Not sure about this because many charities are designed to spend their income, rather than hoard it. A big part of choosing which charity to donate to is, or should be, how effective they are in spending what you give them.

	▲	anticorporate 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, I'm not arguing that if you can find a way to make a large amount of money in an ethical way without enriching yourself or the wealthy further and then find a way to accurately evaluate charities to maximize impact, that you shouldn't do that. But there are several very difficult problems embedded in that path, and I could easily sees just solving all of those problems becoming a full-time job by itself. I also, candidly, haven't ever seen anyone successfully do that.