I suspect the intuition behind asking these questions in this way is this: People mentally have a model of “AGI”, and maybe a model of “nuclear war” or other disasters, and these models are mostly separate (that is, when thinking about AGI timelines, most people “don’t worry about” nuclear war and other disasters, whatever that means. So if you don’t ask people to exclude those considerations, SOME people will exclude them anyway (because they don’t come to mind), while others (call them “pedants” perhaps) will try to manually adjust their model for those considerations, which is technically correct but isn’t really what you wanted, and which means you will get heterogenous answers.
I suspect the intuition behind asking these questions in this way is this: People mentally have a model of “AGI”, and maybe a model of “nuclear war” or other disasters, and these models are mostly separate (that is, when thinking about AGI timelines, most people “don’t worry about” nuclear war and other disasters, whatever that means. So if you don’t ask people to exclude those considerations, SOME people will exclude them anyway (because they don’t come to mind), while others (call them “pedants” perhaps) will try to manually adjust their model for those considerations, which is technically correct but isn’t really what you wanted, and which means you will get heterogenous answers.