Urgency in the sense you seem to have in mind is indeed a relevant consideration in cause prioritization, but I think it should be regarded as a heuristic for finding promising causes rather than as an additional factor in the ITN framework. See BrownHairedEevee’s comment for one approach to doing this, proposed by Toby Ord. If you instead wanted to build ‘urgency’ into the framework, you would need to revise one of the existing factors so that the relevant units are canceled out when the three existing terms and this fourth new term are multiplied together, in such a way that the resulting quantity is still denominated in good done / extra person or dollar (cf. dimensional analysis). But I don’t think there’s a natural or intuitive way of doing this.
Separately, note that the term ‘urgency’ is sometimes used in EA to refer to a different idea. Some people, e.g. some negative-leaning folk, believe that the felt urgency of an aversive experience is a reason for prioritizing its alleviation, over and above its intensity and duration. In this sense, animal welfare seems (arguably) more, rather than less, urgent than AI risk. I think Rockwell has this sense in mind when they object to your choice of terminology.
I don’t full comprehend why we can’t include it. It seems like the ITN framework does not describe the future of the marginal utility per resource spent on the problem but rather the MU/resource right now. If we want to generalize the ITN framework across time, which theoretically we need to do to choose a sequence of decisions, we need to incorporate the fact that tractability and scale are functions of time (and even further the previous decisions we make).
all this is going to do is change the resulting answer from (MU/$) to MU/$(t), where t is time. everything still cancels out the same as before. In practice I don’t know if this is actually useful.
I agree with the view about “urgency” is hard to be in the formula. Because urgency is not related to “good done/ extra person or dollar” for yourself.
An urgent problem means it can only be solved right now, so, if you don’t focus on the more urgent problem, the people in future can’t work on this, it may decrease the good things will have done by future people. But, I don’t know how to value the improtance of “urgency”.
Perhaps it can be captured by ensuring we compare counterfactual impacts.
For an urgent, “now or never” cause, we can be confident that any impact we make wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
For something non-urgent, there is a chance that if we leave it, somebody else could solve it or it could go away naturally. Hence we should discount the expected value of working on this (or in other words we should recognise that the counterfactual impact of working on non-urgent causes, which is what really matters, is lower than the apparent impact).
Urgency in the sense you seem to have in mind is indeed a relevant consideration in cause prioritization, but I think it should be regarded as a heuristic for finding promising causes rather than as an additional factor in the ITN framework. See BrownHairedEevee’s comment for one approach to doing this, proposed by Toby Ord. If you instead wanted to build ‘urgency’ into the framework, you would need to revise one of the existing factors so that the relevant units are canceled out when the three existing terms and this fourth new term are multiplied together, in such a way that the resulting quantity is still denominated in
good done / extra person or dollar(cf. dimensional analysis). But I don’t think there’s a natural or intuitive way of doing this.Separately, note that the term ‘urgency’ is sometimes used in EA to refer to a different idea. Some people, e.g. some negative-leaning folk, believe that the felt urgency of an aversive experience is a reason for prioritizing its alleviation, over and above its intensity and duration. In this sense, animal welfare seems (arguably) more, rather than less, urgent than AI risk. I think Rockwell has this sense in mind when they object to your choice of terminology.
I don’t full comprehend why we can’t include it. It seems like the ITN framework does not describe the future of the marginal utility per resource spent on the problem but rather the MU/resource right now. If we want to generalize the ITN framework across time, which theoretically we need to do to choose a sequence of decisions, we need to incorporate the fact that tractability and scale are functions of time (and even further the previous decisions we make).
all this is going to do is change the resulting answer from (MU/$) to MU/$(t), where t is time. everything still cancels out the same as before. In practice I don’t know if this is actually useful.
I agree with the view about “urgency” is hard to be in the formula. Because urgency is not related to “good done/ extra person or dollar” for yourself.
An urgent problem means it can only be solved right now, so, if you don’t focus on the more urgent problem, the people in future can’t work on this, it may decrease the good things will have done by future people. But, I don’t know how to value the improtance of “urgency”.
Perhaps it can be captured by ensuring we compare counterfactual impacts.
For an urgent, “now or never” cause, we can be confident that any impact we make wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
For something non-urgent, there is a chance that if we leave it, somebody else could solve it or it could go away naturally. Hence we should discount the expected value of working on this (or in other words we should recognise that the counterfactual impact of working on non-urgent causes, which is what really matters, is lower than the apparent impact).