I didn't downvote you,

Thanks! I upvoted you.

but what you're saying is essentially "if you accept our tribe is the most awesome and smartest, then it makes sense to donate to our tribal charity". Which is something every single group would say, in slight variation.

Well yeah; that's why you should examine the evidence and not just do what everyone else does. So let's look at the beliefs of all the Singularitarians on LW as evidence. What would we expect to see if LW is just an arbitrary tribe that picked a random cause to glom around? I suspect we would see that not many people in the world, and particularly not high-status people and organizations, would pay attention to the Singularity. I predict that everyone on LW would donate money to SIAI and shun people who don't donate or belittle SIAI.

Now what would we see if LW is in fact a group of high-quality rationalists and the world, in general, is too blinded by various biases to think rationally about low-probability, high-impact events? Well, most people, including high-status people (but perhaps not some academics) wouldn't talk about it. People on LW would donate money to SIAI because they did the calculation and decided it was the highest expected value. And they would probably shun the people who disagree, because they're still humans.

Those two situations look awfully similar to me. My point is, I certainly don't think that you can use LW's enthusiasm about SIAI compared to the general public as a strike against LW or SIAI.

Here's results chart for various asteroid tracking efforts. Catalina Sky Survey seems to be doing most of the work these days, and you can probably donate to University of Arizona and have that money go to CSS somehow. I'm not really following this too closely, I'm mostly glad that some people are doing something here.

I'm not finding anything there indicating that they're hurting for funding, but perhaps I'm missing it.