Becoming a Researcher in a Non-EA-Priority Field vs Donating $100k / Year to EA Research

Mechanical + electrical engineering graduate who likes research and is trying to compare two career paths:Become a professor / researcher who spends their career identifying, tackling, and pivoting between neglected scientific problems that are not among 80,000 Hours' main recommended paths (e.g., advanced manufacturing, alternative energy storage, cryptography, etc.).Take a higher-paying career with decent work-life balance (say, ML engineer earning $400k / yr) and donate around $100k/year to support researchers working on cause areas that EA generally considers most important (e.g., biosecurity, AI policy, animal welfare).Note: Though I want to tackle and pivot between neglected scientific problems through research, I'm not interested in the major EA cause areas at the moment, nor do I expect to be in the near future. Also, I would care a lot about WLB if I went the non-researcher route, so taking on a higher paying career would not be an option in that case.TL;DR: Has anyone seen rigorous discussion online of how to compare these two options?One way I've tried to think about it is whether I could earn and donate enough to "replace" the impact I might have had as a researcher. After all, $100k / yr is probably enough to fund an additional PhD student, but there are other factors to consider (funded student may not become a professor / work on neglected problems for instance). More importantly, this way of thinking doesn't seem quite right, since the funded researcher would not be a direct replacement for me -- the tradeoff seems closer to:Contributing directly to a potentially neglected but non-EA-priority field, versusHelping fund one additional researcher working in a major EA cause areaAre there any posts, blogs, or quantitative analyses that address this kind of tradeoff? If anybody has any general thoughts or insights too, I would be curious to hear them.Discuss