(Of all the naysayers who I've come across in the past many years, if a tenth of them were willing to fund me to work on AGI, by now I'd be well on my way to prove them wrong. But therein lies the rub. Why would they spend money on being proven wrong?)
Naysayers have already decided they won't invest in AGI. Perhaps if you approached yaysayers instead of naysayers, you'd have a better chance of getting funded. The only question they would have to answer is, why fund you, specifically, instead of someone else.
That is my current strategy, i.e., to work with the yaysayers. "Why me" would be the least of my worries. My biggest hurdle was getting a Ph.D degree in a highly multidisciplinary field and that's now out of the way.
(Of all the naysayers who I've come across in the past many years, if a tenth of them were willing to fund me to work on AGI, by now I'd be well on my way to prove them wrong. But therein lies the rub. Why would they spend money on being proven wrong?)