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timtyler comments on Observed Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong
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The recent "givewell" interview drew the parallel in the case of the SIAI:
I suspect that isn't quite right. The FHI endorses the "maxipok" principle. It is more about promising hell-avoidance than heavenly benefits. I am not sure the SIAI is sold on this - and I have heard them waxing lyrical on the "heavenly benefits" side - but I expect they will agree that the position makes sense.
Its worth noting that the SIAI representative agreed that he shouldn't support SIAI unless it passed those hurdles, he merely argued that it did.
To my knowledge no SIAI employee has ever made the Pascal's mugging type argument, it is a pure strawman.
So, the idea is not that the organisation accompanies its requests for donations with a confession that it is just waving high utility in front of them in the hope of parting them from their money. That is hardly likely to be an effective fundraising strategy. Nobody ever suggested that in the first place. The idea is more that it uses promises of very high utility to compensate for a lack of concrete success probabilities - much like Pascal's mugger does.
If you are short of examples of them waving high utitily around, perhaps see:
How Much it Matters to Know What Matters: A Back of the Envelope Calculation
Good find -- and I think both promises of hell avoidance and heavenly benefits count as Pascal's Mugging.