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 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!
Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.
The first people to explain the universe (and take some contributions for that) produced something of negative value, nearly all of the medicine until last couple hundred years was not only ineffective but completely harmful, and so on.
If you look at very narrow definitions, of course, the first to tackle nuclear bomb creation did succeed - but the first to tackle the general problem of weapon of mass destruction were various shamans sending a curse. If saving people from AI is an easy problem, then we'll survive without SI; if it's a hard problem, at any rate SI doesn't start with a letter from Einstein to the government, it starts with a person with no quantifiable accomplishments cleverly employing oneself. As far as I am concerned, there's literally no case for donations here; the donations happen via sort of decision noise similar to how NASA has spent millions on various antigravity devices, the power companies have spent millions on putting electrons in hydrogen orbitals at below ground level (see Mills hydrinos), and millions were invested in Steorn's magnetic engine.
Ghmm. He said first people to take money, not first people to tackle.
Speaking of yourself in the third person?
Dmytry, you are abusing sockpuppet accounts. Your use of private_messaging was questionable, but at least you declared it as an alias early on. Right now you are using a sockpuppet with the intent to deceive.
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.