They would need to compete with lots of other projects working on AI Alignment.
But yes, I fundamentally agree: if there was a project that convincingly had a >1% chance of solving AI alignment it seems very likely it would be able to raise ~1M/year (maybe even ~10?)
not just sitting on piles of cash because it would be "weird" to pay a Fields medalist 500k a year.
They literally paid Kmett 400k/year for years to work on some approach to explainable AI in Haskell.
I think people in this thread vastly overestimate how much money MIRI has (they have ~10M, see the 990s and the donations page https://intelligence.org/topcontributors/), and underestimate how much would top people cost.
I think the top 1% earners in the US all make >500k/year? Maybe if not the top 1% the top 0.5%?
Even Kmett (who is famous in the Haskell community, but is no Terence Tao) is almost certainly making way more than 500k$ now
I highly doubt most people reading this are "around 2-4 sigmas above the mean", if that's even a meaningful concept.
The choice between earning to give and direct work is definitely nontrivial though: there are many precedents of useful work done by "average" individuals, even in mathematics.
But I do get the feeling that MIRI thinks the relative value of hiring random expensive people would be <0, which seems consistent with how other groups trying to solve hard problems approach things.
E.g. I don't see Tesla paying billions to famous mathematicians/smart people to "solve self-driving".
Edit: Yudkowsky answered https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Gkqus9vusXRevR8/late-2021-miri-conversations-ama-discussion?commentId=9K2ioAJGDRfRuDDCs , apparently I was wrong and it's because you can't just pay top people to work on problems that don't interest them.