Source is me.

(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.

I get the impression you have a grudge towards something but it isn't clear to me what that is.

If you have already cleared the biggest hurdle you can think of, why the grudge? It should be smooth sailing for you from hereon out.

I just want to clarify (for the record) that I didn't mean investor community (which I have not approached yet).

I was mainly talking about my friends (most, actually all, of whom are naysayers) and people I interact with online.