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.