However, not studying dentistry could also be a risk if human-level AGI comes slowly — for instance, if AGI isn’t developed in the next 30 years. In that case, dentists probably won’t be replaced for 30 years.

I think this is unlikely, since almost all work that is done by dentists today could be automated with current levels of AI. In theory this could mean more employment for dentists, since perhaps if dentistry were cheaper people would want a lot more of it, but while I do think this is how things work in many fields I think that's unlikely for dentists.

I think it's overall very hard to predict where things would go, so if I were a college freshman I would try to (a) maximize my options by staying flexible and learning a lot of different things and (b) stay on top of the tech as it matures so I'm in a position to notice when things newly become possible and take advantage of that (younger people tend to be much more adaptable).

This creates a credible commitment where the charity receives funds if and only if a matcher steps in. So the matcher can be confident that their donation actually caused the charity to receive the funder’s contribution.

It looks to me like you can't be confident that the matcher who steps in is someone other than the funder, and the funder being their own matcher-of-last-resort destroys the counterfactuality.

Let's say I intend to donate $2X to a charity. I use your system, with a pot of $X. If people donate $X, I send an additional $X to my charity some other way and it receives a total of $3X. If people donate $0 I anonymously use my second $X to meet the terms of the smart contract, and it receives a total of $2X (same as if I'd not set up this match). My $2X went to the charity regardless, and no one who contributed to the matching campaign affected the distribution of my funds.

@Ben Kuhn has a log at https://www.benkuhn.net/ea/ , though the last donation is 2019.  I don't know if that's putting giving on hold vs no longer updating the list?

I think the highest priority question is probably something about how quickly you expect AI to go. I'm mostly not planning anything 8 years out, because I think the world is likely to be massively different.

The next highest priority question is something about how you expect AI to impact your various potential career options. For example, it seems plausible to me that almost all dental care could be moderately skilled people wearing high resolution cameras and receiving real-time advice from AIs with current tech, let alone near-future tech, and 8 years is a long time for society to catch up. On the other hand, CS is becoming automated even more rapidly!

So this isn't really the question you're asking, but I'd prioritize learning how to get the most out of frontier AI systems: getting good at specifying what you want and recognizing whether you've received that. A lot of this is traditionally management. I'd try to do as much of this while in college as possible, but not stay any longer than necessary; 4y is already a very long time.

Seems worth doing!

Yup! Linked from the bottom of the post.

Also (not linked; learned about it in comments) a nursing home

Why is it good practice to allow a post to be on the forum for some time before the response is available to readers?

meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed

Note that this factory was just producing polypropylene pellets, not melt-blown fabric or masks themselves.

The pellets also last ~indefinitely if well stored (no UV, no heat, minimal oxygen, low humidity), and so are well suited for stockpiling. But you'd probably want to move up the chain and stockpile the fabric instead, or perhaps N95s themselves, or perhaps reusable respirators, ...

Currently, when I see something that reads as AI written that's a pretty strong signal that the nominal author doesn't fully stand behind the post.  I really hate it when I engage deeply with the arguments in a post and write a carefully reply, only to learn that the author wasn't really trying to say that and didn't review the output of their AI carefully enough.

I think maybe that wasn't public until 2026-01 with Dario's "All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth"?