I'll watch this tonight, from the summaries I generally agree with him. I feel the same way about brilliant math and physics people doing HFT for Goldman Sachs. But I'd also point out that from a comparative advantage perspective, it may be optimal to earn lots of money in a "useless" area and then donate where it makes a difference. If you can earn $500k/year at a hedge fund and give half of that to SENS, that's probably better than quitting your job to learn molecular biology from scratch.
Maybe, maybe not. It's a real challenge to hire the good software engineers, but a good engineer can be extremely productive (the old 10x efficiency thing). So, if you are one of the good ones, you can probably do a lot more good with your skills than with money.
Put it another way, anybody can throw money at the problem (and a lot of people do). But not many can write algorithms that efficiently work on terabyte data sets.
