> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very

> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. "If killer GMOs have even a 1% chance of happening this century and donations to Greenpeace reduce the risk of them killing everyone by 1% that's still money well spent." Would you find that argument compelling? My guess is that most people would find the "even 1%" much too high for both cases. And that's with technology we could, theoretically, do bad things with today if we really wanted to for some reason, not some far off technology we might not get to for centuries. The made up statistics "rationalists" like to use are pretty similar to certain sales techniques you see from less reputable quarters. For instance, multi-level marketing companies - "You probably know, what, 100 people at least? And if even a small amount of them, say 5%, sign up, they get a small amount of their friends - ~5% - to sign up, and they get a small amount of their friends to sign up - well, soon you have 125 people you're getting money from while you're hardly doing any work!" The sleight of hand is pretending that a percentage is small, because in most cases a percentage of that size is considered small, when in this particular case it's orders of magnitude larger than reality.