We run into the Gambler’s Ruin pretty quickly when dealing with bets concerning existential risk reduction, so the assumption that the benefits and harms are equal and opposite seems questionable. Expected utility calculations need a lot of tweaks in cases like this.
I was not suggesting that this is the actual math; I was merely giving an example to show that the possibility of an existential risk reduction effort backfiring does not necessarily make it a bad idea to contribute.
We run into the Gambler’s Ruin pretty quickly when dealing with bets concerning existential risk reduction, so the assumption that the benefits and harms are equal and opposite seems questionable. Expected utility calculations need a lot of tweaks in cases like this.
I was not suggesting that this is the actual math; I was merely giving an example to show that the possibility of an existential risk reduction effort backfiring does not necessarily make it a bad idea to contribute.