If you try to forecast the future or gauge risks as a professional responsibility, it is reasonable to create a model to reflect the contingencies in your analy

If you try to forecast the future or gauge risks as a professional responsibility, it is reasonable to create a model to reflect the contingencies in your analysis to reflect an overall likelihood number. Tegmark is not claiming his opinion is fact because of his diagram/model, he is openly putting his mental model of contingencies out there for inspection and critique. You are welcome then to critique either the model or the percentages in the model or both, which is slightly more helpful for discussion than arguing about some overall risk number since it allows you to disagree and identify more specific areas of weakness in the analysis. Your claim that Tegmark is treating this as fact is not supported by the evidence I see in his lesswrong article (note: not a scientific publication) where he is asking others which percentages in his model they disagree with; that is not the behavior of someone claiming his assumptions/conclusions are a fact. You yourself are being sloppy with the truth. The numbers on the graph are made up? Agreed. Out of thin air? No, RTFA. Non-authoritative? Agreed. Tegmark is presenting his opinion as scientific fact? What are you smoking? Quit projecting your teenage self onto Tegmark.