[pmichaud]

One of the basic metrics that EA people track is "neglect," so if there's a way to make a big impact that actually seems possible to do, but also there's already a lot of people and money doing it (ie., it's not "neglected"), then EA people will mostly just let the other people do it.

The idea is to spend each marginal dollar in a high impact way, and a marginal dollar into a cause area that is already flush with cash won't make a big difference.

Getting more talent (instead of money) into the field is a different kind of intervention, but the energy field fails a different metric here which is "tractability," in the sense that EA people don't have any particular expertise or advantage in recruiting or training game-changing talent for the field, so it's not "tractable" even though it would hypothetically be nice if more top talent were in the field.