Imagine what the global financial sector would look like if it was funded to the tune of $600,000/year. You would probably think it wasn't worth scaling up Earth's financial sector.

And one might even be right about that.

A better analogy might be if regulation of the global financial sector were funded at 600k/yr.

If you can't think of anything medium-probable, using that as an excuse to do nothing is unacceptable.

That's my gut feeling as well, but can we give a theoretical basis for that conclusion, which might also potentially be used to convince people who can't think of anything medium-probable to "do something"?

My current thoughts are

1. I assign some non-zero credence to having an unbounded utility function.
2. Bostrom and Toby's moral parliament idea seems to be the best that we have about how to handle moral uncertainty.
3. If Pascal's wager argument works, and to the extent that I have a faction representing unbounded utility in my moral parliament, I ought to spend a fraction of my resources on Pascal's wager type "opportunities"
4. If Pascal's wager argument works, I should pick the best wager to bet on, which intuitively could well be "push for a positive Singularity"
5. But it's not clear that Pascal's wager argument works or what could be the justification for thinking that "push for a positive Singularity" is the best wager. We also don't have any theory to handle this kind of philosophical uncertainty.
6. Given all this, I still have to choose between "do nothing", "push for positive Singularity", or "investigate Pascal's wager". Is there any way, in this decision problem, to improve upon going with my gut?

Anyway, I understand that you probably have reasons not to engage too deeply with this line of thought, so I'm mostly explaining where I'm currently at, as well as hoping that someone else can offer some ideas.

Money is the unit of caring and it really is impossible to overstate how much things change when you add money to them.

Can you give an example relevant to the context at hand to illustrate what you have in mind? I don't necessarily disagree, but I presently think that there's a tenable argument that money is seldom the key limiting factor for philanthropic efforts in the developed world.

Yes, I had read that, and perhaps even more apropos (from Shut up and do the impossible!):

You might even be justified in refusing to use probabilities at this point. In all honesty, I really don't know how to estimate the probability of solving an impossible problem that I have gone forth with intent to solve; in a case where I've previously solved some impossible problems, but the particular impossible problem is more difficult than anything I've yet solved, but I plan to work on it longer, etcetera.

People ask me how likely it is that humankind will survive, or how likely it is that anyone can build a Friendly AI, or how likely it is that I can build one. I really don't know how to answer. I'm not being evasive; I don't know how to put a probability estimate on my, or someone else, successfully shutting up and doing the impossible. Is it probability zero because it's impossible? Obviously not. But how likely is it that this problem, like previous ones, will give up its unyielding blankness when I understand it better? It's not truly impossible, I can see that much. But humanly impossible? Impossible to me in particular? I don't know how to guess. I can't even translate my intuitive feeling into a number, because the only intuitive feeling I have is that the "chance" depends heavily on my choices and unknown unknowns: a wildly unstable probability estimate.

But it's not clear whether Eliezer means that he can't even translate his intuitive feeling into a word like "small" or "medium". I thought the comment I was replying to was saying that SIAI had a "medium" chance of success, given:

If you can't argue for a medium probability of a large impact, you shouldn't bother.

and

I don't consider myself to be multiplying small probabilities by large utility intervals at any point in my strategy

But perhaps I misinterpreted? In any case, there's still the question of what is rational for those of us who do think SIAI's chance of success is "small".