Jack - I think EA needs a lot more people trained in biology, for the reasons you mentioned. 

I see a fair number of factual and theoretical errors being made when EA discussions of essentially biological topics (e.g. animal sentience, transhumanism, biotech) are dominated by computer scientists plus moral philosophers, without enough input from bio experts. 

At the individual level, a CS degree might be worth more with regard to expected career income. But at the collective level, EA needs a broader range of expertise, especially in really foundational sciences like evolutionary biology, animal behavior, genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary game theory, etc. 

Plus, biology is just endlessly fascinating, rewarding, and grounding -- fun to learn about, fun to share with partners and kids, and awe-inspiring with regard to appreciating the antiquity, diversity, and complexity of life.

You may be interested in this 2021 WSJ article: "A Technology Race to Stop the Mass Killing of Baby Chicks: An estimated six billion newly hatched male chicks are killed world-wide each year. New technologies are being developed to stop that."

I know George Church is a big name in bio/genetics who seems to have interests in transhumanism. 

Another WSJ article just weeks ago: "Scientists at DeepMind and Meta Press Fusion of AI, Biology".  

I would think bio is a great thing to go into! However, I'd guess your point (4) has significant truth to it. If you do bio,  I'd make sure you still learn your math! Math is the language of science. I think there are a lot of people that major in bio and get a kind of "soft" pre-med style bio education which is mostly memorizing stuff. I would see if you can do like a computational bio major or double major with math, applied-math, stats, or CS. I'd try to take several courses in probability/statistics/machine learning.

1. ^{^}

   If that article is paywalled, try this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1shcLzlS8qf7ODbqMqiHtwRzFminRpiC3/view

As a person who was a biologist and now does ML:

My impression is EAs (especially 80k) think you will make an impact through research only if you are in the top few percent of researchers in the world. I think that is especially hard to achieve in biology (especially wet-lab biology) because:

• Success in biology is incredibly resource constrained. So getting into a rich lab is key
• Success in biology is much more luck-dependent than other fields. Intelligence is secondary.

Other reasons to not do biology:

• Biology postdocs/PhDs work longer and are paid lesser than CS

• Feedback cycles in biology have long time windows. This means it can take years to know your project failed. Personally, I found this incredibly demotivating but people’s tolerance for this can differ

• Option value for other jobs is worse. If you have a CS degree and decide to leave academia it’s easier to get an industry job than it’s for bio