So what are our Mid-Term goals?

very few rationalists seem to subscribe to the popular belief that allowing someone you can't see to suffer by your inaction is somehow different from walking on while some kid you don't know bleeds out on the pavement.

I believe that the latter is evidence, and the former isn't, of being unusually callous and potentially worthy of suspicion. (Nitpicking, I know, but if you're going to be skeptical of naive ethics and try to be a consequentialist, it's important to notice valid implicit judgments like this.)

SIAI's second priority is to raise the sanity waterline. A lot of people put their efforts towards that. For example: creating LW meetups in new cities, writing articles, and simply being more rational people.

One useful suggestion is to earn a lot of money and donate it to a good cause, VillageReach and GiveWell being some of the best. GiveWell is a charity evaluation site that finds especially cost-effective charities, and gives all donations above what it needs to the best ones. VillageReach is GiveWell's most highly recommended group; it provides basic healthcare to people in the third world. And of course, explaining the idea of efficient charity to other people so they do this too is a good force multiplier.

Making as much money as possible and donating it to the SIAI I think, to raise the probability of it succeeding. It's far from reaching any point of diminishing returns if I remember correctly.

Your link "Giles is attempting to form a altruist community" seems to be broken.

I know that Rationalism is fairly spread out as an ideology, but, thankfully, very few rationalists seem to subscribe to the popular belief that allowing someone you can't see to suffer by your inaction is somehow different from walking on while some kid you don't know bleeds out on the pavement.

That's mostly the utilitarians, as I understand it. I know that not very many philosophers are utilitarians - less than 25% - but it would be interesting to know how many self-declared rationalists are.

However, a lot of the community's mid-term plans seem to be riding on the success of the SIAI project, and although I am not qualified to judge it's probability...

This seems like something where there's a high value-of-information. As a Bayesian, you can come up with a (subjective) probability of more or less anything, even if it's just your original arbitrary prior probability. The feeling of "not being qualified to judge" corresponds (I think) to expecting that further information (which is currently available to experts) would be highly valuable when it comes to making decisions.

So do you feel that further information on this topic wouldn't be valuable (e.g. no useful skills to contribute), or do you feel that the cost is too high (e.g. you've read everything that's immediately available and it still doesn't make any sense)?