The Insight through making loop is powerful in part because more insight leads to expanded opportunities for making, which lead to expanded opportunities for insight.
Because marginal capital can cause marginal “making,” it might appear that this loop could then turn marginal capital into marginal insight. Unfortunately, there seems to be an efficiency ratio which prevents us from significantly increasing making capacity without also increasing insight capacity (whether through better-understood practices or through finding more already-effective investigators).
In short: our insight-return-on-capital curve flattens out fairly quickly as capital increases.
2023-12-17: I’m not sure this is true anymore.