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Muhd comments on Why I'm Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too) - Less Wrong
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These were my thoughts when I read this.
A better analogy might be buying stock in a technology startup which is making a product completely unlike anything on the market now. It is certainly more risky than the sure thing, with lots of potential for losing your investment, but also has a much much higher potential payoff. This is generally the case in any sort of investing, whether it be investing in a charity or in a business -- the higher the risk, the higher the potential gain. The sure stuff generally has plenty of funding already -- the low hanging fruit has already been taken.
That being said, one should be on the lookout for good investing opportunities of both kinds -- charging more (in terms of expected payoff) for the riskier ones but not shunning either completely.
I think this is also a dangerous example because most of the salient and readily-available examples of doing this are the highly-publicized successes (this might be less true for people who are actually actively involved in technology investment - I say this from the perspective of an outsider).