and are only offering risk reduction due to their incompetence combined with Dunning-Kruger effect.
You realize DK is a narrow effect which only obtains in certain conditions, is still controversial, and invoking it just makes you look like you'll grab at any thing at all no matter how dubious in order to attack SI, right? (About on the same level as 'Hitler was an atheist!')
It never happened in the history that the first people to take money for cure would be anything but either self deluded or confidence tricksters
Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and still stuck in the Dark Ages than the one we actually live in. I realize this may be a hard concept, but sometimes, the first person to tackle a problem - succeeds! In fact, sometimes multiple people tackling the problem all simultaneously succeed! (This is very common; called multiple discovery.)
Not every problem is as hard as fusion, or to put it another way, most hard problems are made of other, easier, problems, while if your hyperbolic statement were true, no progress would ever be made.
Dunning Kruger effect is likely a product of some general deficiency in the meta reasoning facility leading both to failure of reasoning itself and failure of evaluation of the reasoning; extremely relevant to people that proclaim themselves to be more rational, more moral, and so on than anyone else but do not seem to accomplish above mediocre performance at fairly trivial yet quantifiable things.
...Seriously. In no area of research, medicine, engineering, or whatever, the first group to tackle a problem succeeded? Such a world would be far poorer and stil
Nick Szabo on acting on extremely long odds with claimed high payoffs:
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutral, then I should expend up to nearly $1 million dollars worth of effort to gain this boon. The problems with these beliefs tend to be at least threefold, all stemming from the general uncertainty, i.e. the poor information or lack of information, from which we abstracted the low probability estimate in the first place: because in the messy real world the low probability estimate is almost always due to low or poor evidence rather than being a lottery with well-defined odds.
Nick clarifies in the comments that he is indeed talking about singularitarians, including his GMU colleague Robin Hanson. This post appears to revisit a comment on an earlier post:
In other words, just because one comes up with quasi-plausible catastrophic scenarios does not put the burden of proof on the skeptics to debunk them or else cough up substantial funds to supposedly combat these alleged threats.