If you can only make decisions by putting the probabilities into a spreadsheet then you have no choice but to pull numbers out of your ass or you’ll never be able to decide what the most important cause in the world is

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I mean, why not 9%? Why not 20%? ’More than 10’ is just so clearly pulled out of their ass

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That is to say, the motivation to express a p(doom) comes from the idiosyncratic epistemic / ethical decision-making framework, rather than the availability of sufficient evidence to estimate such a number, whatever it may mean.

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What makes it click is to understand that Rationalist/EA thought says you should allocate resources according to expected values, and so you need probabilities to plug into the expected value formula. To decide what to allocate to AI Safety, you need a number for the spreadsheet. That’s p(doom).

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It really doesn’t make sense without understanding that the speaker has a strange worldview that requires numerical probabilities assigned to everything so that he can perform the necessary calculations to determine what’s important and what’s not. Most people don’t have this worldview, though.

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