Hello everyone,
I'm a 19-year-old student considering whether I should spend 4 more years in dental school in order to earn to give as a dentist to reduce AI s-risks.
The decision is complicated, but I'd isolate only one sub-question: 80,000 Hours has said that earning to give usually isn’t the best option. However, there may be only 10–20% (I'm uncertain, it may be wrong) of aspiring EA people in AI risks getting hired or funded to do AI safety research. meaning EA people(including me) have 80% of chance to not be hired/funded.:
Many donors say they “don’t know where to spend the plentiful money,” while 80% of people still can’t get funding. That's just intuitively contradictory. If AI safety isn’t severely funding-constrained, why not lower the bar and fund more “average” projects?
Maybe that average projects contribute far less than top projects. But if they aren’t funded, they can't do research at all, and their impact is close to 0 (unless they can contribute effectively in the non-EA world, which seems unlikely for many average people)
I’ve thought of three possible justifications:
- Patient philanthropy: Saving money to achieve higher leverage in the future.
- Backfire risks: many projects may have near-zero or negative expected value.
- Career capital: junior researchers should build skills before being funded (However, it seems there are also many senior AI risk people getting rejected.)
I’m eager to know what reasons I’m missing.
So my question is: What are other reasons that "Even if there is a lot of money, the funding bar should remain high and most projects should still be rejected?
As a 19 y/o who's spent 300 hours thinking about this alone, I'm hitting diminishing returns from isolated thinking. So, any outside perspective would be genuinely valuable.
Please DON'T aim for a rigorous answer. Quantity-over-quality brainstorming may be better—I'd prefer 1 minute half-baked thoughts or even scattered biases over silence. Even replies of only 1 short sentence “I think one reason is X” would be extremely helpful. (Also, feel free to criticize any of my thoughts). Thank you very much.
