I think this argument makes a lot of sense when applied to domains with a certain level of existing resources, but not for fields which are so neglected that there are virtually no resources spent there right now. In other words, I think the logarithmic returns framework breaks down for really high neglectedness, for two reasons:
High neglectedness is a signal of unusually high intractability—e.g. the “no plan of attack” case you describe, but also more subtle barriers. For example, we might have a brilliant intervention to reduce air pollution in China, but foreign funding regulations might be such a bottleneck that we couldn’t actually spend any of that.
High neglectedness means there is not a lot of infrastructure to absorb the money needed to solve the problem. For example, I wrote about extreme heat adaptation for the Cause Exploration Prizes, and ultimately assessed that it could not be an area for giving simply because I could not find any organizations that work on extreme heat adaptation, so there was simply nowhere to spend money. You could argue that over a sufficiently long period, money could be used to create that infrastructure e.g. incubate organizations, but it’s an open question to me resource-elastic that is and intuitively it doesn’t feel logarithmic.
So in a perverse way, high neglectedness (which is generally desirable) is usually correlated with low tractability, and possibly tractability outside the logarithmic framework.
I think this argument makes a lot of sense when applied to domains with a certain level of existing resources, but not for fields which are so neglected that there are virtually no resources spent there right now. In other words, I think the logarithmic returns framework breaks down for really high neglectedness, for two reasons:
High neglectedness is a signal of unusually high intractability—e.g. the “no plan of attack” case you describe, but also more subtle barriers. For example, we might have a brilliant intervention to reduce air pollution in China, but foreign funding regulations might be such a bottleneck that we couldn’t actually spend any of that.
High neglectedness means there is not a lot of infrastructure to absorb the money needed to solve the problem. For example, I wrote about extreme heat adaptation for the Cause Exploration Prizes, and ultimately assessed that it could not be an area for giving simply because I could not find any organizations that work on extreme heat adaptation, so there was simply nowhere to spend money. You could argue that over a sufficiently long period, money could be used to create that infrastructure e.g. incubate organizations, but it’s an open question to me resource-elastic that is and intuitively it doesn’t feel logarithmic.
So in a perverse way, high neglectedness (which is generally desirable) is usually correlated with low tractability, and possibly tractability outside the logarithmic framework.