What is this, the second coming of C.S. Lewis and his trilemma? SI must either be completely right and demi-gods who will save us all or they must be deluded fools who suffer from some psychological bias - can you really think of no intermediates between 'saviors of humanity' and 'deluded fools who cannot possibly do any good', which might apply?
No, it comes out of what SI members claim about themselves and their methods - better than science, we are more rational, etc etc etc. That really drives down the probability of anything in the middle between the claimed excellence and the incompetence compatible with the fact of making those claims (you need sufficient incompetence to claim extreme competence). If they didn't want that sort of dichotomy they should have kept their extreme arrogance from surfacing. (Or alternatively they wanted this dichotomy, to drive some people into fallacies from politeness)
Alternatives would also be evidence against donating, too, since what makes you think they are the best one out of all the alternatives? Curious how either way, one should not donate!
Do you have a disagreement besides fairly stupid rhetoric? The lack of alternatives is genuinely evidence against SI's cause, whereas presence of alternatives would genuinely make it unlikely that either of them is necessary. Yep, it's very curious, and very inconvenient for you. The logic is sometimes impeccably against what you like. Without some seriously solid evidence in favour of SI, it is a Pascalian wager as the chance of SI making a difference is small.
Do you have a disagreement besides fairly stupid rhetoric? The lack of alternatives is genuinely evidence against SI's cause, whereas presence of alternatives would genuinely make it unlikely that either of them is necessary. Yep, it's very curious, and very inconvenient for you. The logic is sometimes impeccably against what you like. Without some seriously solid evidence in favour of SI, it is a Pascalian wager as the chance of SI making a difference is small.
I'll rephrase: your argument from alternatives is as much bullshit as invoking Dunning-Kruger...
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.