Both an argument and its opposite cannot lead to the same conclusion unless the argument is completely irrelevant to the conclusion.
It's not an argument and it's opposite. One of the assumptions in either argument is 'opposite', that could make distinction between those two assumptions irrelevant but the arguments themselves remain very relevant.
I take as other alternatives everyone who could of worked on AI risk but didn't, because I consider it to be an alternative not to work on AI risk now. Some other people take as other alternatives people working on precisely the kind of AI risk reduction that SI works on. In which case the absence of alternatives - under this meaning of 'alternatives' - is evidence against SI's cause - against the idea that one should work on such AI risk reduction now. There should be no way how you can change - against same world - meanings of the words and arrive at different conclusion; it only happens if you are exercising in the rationalization and rhetoric. In electromagnetism if you are to change right hand rule to left hand rule every conclusion will stay the same; in reasoning if you wiggle what is 'alternatives' that should not change the conclusion either.
This concludes our discussion. Pseudologic derived from formal maxims and employing the method of collision (like in this case, colliding 'assumption' with 'argument') is too annoying.
I hope you don't mind if I don't reply to you any further until it's clear whether you're a Dmytry sockpuppet.
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.