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jsteinhardt comments on The Inefficiency of Theoretical Discovery - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm not talking about cause neutrality. My point is that even once the general problem has been decided, there are many possible approaches, and academics often do things that seem inefficient but are actually exploring the space of possible approaches (possibly by trying to better understand the objects they are studying).
What level of "general problem" do you have in mind? To a large degree I'm thinking about things like "Gosh, it took (unnecessary) centuries or decades for researchers to launch subfields to study normative uncertainty and intelligence explosion", and that could be a "lack of cause neutrality" problem. And maybe you're thinking instead on a smaller scale, and want to say something like "Given that people decide to work on X, they're relatively efficient in working on X, and exploring the space within X, even if they're completely missing normative uncertainty and intelligence explosion."