I suspect it’s mostly proportional to the answer to the question “how much progress can you expect to make building on the previous work of others?” in a particular field. This is why (for example) philosophy is weird (you can make a lot of progress without paying attention to what previous folks have said), physics and math benefit from study (you can do a lot more cool stuff if you know what others know), and AI safety may benefit from original thinking (there’s not much worth building off of (yet)).
I suspect it’s mostly proportional to the answer to the question “how much progress can you expect to make building on the previous work of others?” in a particular field. This is why (for example) philosophy is weird (you can make a lot of progress without paying attention to what previous folks have said), physics and math benefit from study (you can do a lot more cool stuff if you know what others know), and AI safety may benefit from original thinking (there’s not much worth building off of (yet)).