gwern comments on Common sense as a prior - Less Wrong
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Hi Brian :-)
How do you know this? It's true that their utility functions aren't linear, but it doesn't follow that that's why they don't take such efforts seriously. Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us reports on concerted efforts to prevent extinction-level asteroids from colliding into earth. This shows that people are (sometimes) willing to act on small probabilities of human extinction.
Dovetailing from my comment above, I think that there's a risk of following the line of thought "I'm doing X because it fulfills certain values that I have. Other people don't have these values. So the fact that they don't engage in X, and don't think that doing X is a good idea, isn't evidence against X being a good idea for me" without considering the possibility that despite the fact that they don't have your values, doing X or something analogous to X would fulfill their (different) values conditioning on your factual beliefs being right, so that the fact that they don't do or endorse X is evidence against your factual beliefs connected with X. In a given instance, there will be a subtle judgment call as to how much weight to give to this possibility, but I think that it should always be considered.
Unfortunately, it's a mixed case: there were motives besides pure altruism/self-interest. For example, Edward Teller was an advocate of asteroid defense... no doubt in part because it was a great excuse for using atomic bombs and keeping space and laser-related research going.