The point is that it is still a Pascal's wager even if you have mis-estimated probabilities and argued that it is actually likely that God exists.
In case of SI, even if we assume that risk exists it is still the case that one is to donate to group of people whom, in all likelihood, are entirely incapable of affecting the risk in any way what so ever (and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect. It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters)
and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect.
You realize DK is a narrow effect which only obtains in certain conditions, is still controversial, and invoking it just makes you look like you'll grab at any thing at all no matter how dubious in order to attack SI, right? (About on the same level as 'Hitler was an atheist!')
It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters
Seriously. In no area of research,...
Nick Szabo on acting on extremely long odds with claimed high payoffs:
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutral, then I should expend up to nearly $1 million dollars worth of effort to gain this boon. The problems with these beliefs tend to be at least threefold, all stemming from the general uncertainty, i.e. the poor information or lack of information, from which we abstracted the low probability estimate in the first place: because in the messy real world the low probability estimate is almost always due to low or poor evidence rather than being a lottery with well-defined odds.
Nick clarifies in the comments that he is indeed talking about singularitarians, including his GMU colleague Robin Hanson. This post appears to revisit a comment on an earlier post:
In other words, just because one comes up with quasi-plausible catastrophic scenarios does not put the burden of proof on the skeptics to debunk them or else cough up substantial funds to supposedly combat these alleged threats.