A way around this problem is to rate each criteria, while ‘controlling for’ the others.
For example, rather than ask ‘how important is this cause?‘, instead ask ‘how important would it be if nobody were doing anything about it?‘, or ‘how important is this cause relative to others that are equally as neglected?‘. Rather than ask ‘how tractable is this cause on the margin?‘, instead ask ‘how tractable would it be if nobody were working on it?‘, or ‘how tractable is it relative to other causes that are equally neglected?’.
Those questions would be inappropriate if we weren’t considering neglectedness separately, but fortunately we are.
This strikes me as a weird way to go about it. You’re essentially taking your best estimate about how effective a cause is, breaking out its effectiveness into three separate factors, and then re-combining those three factors to estimate its effectiveness. You’re going to lose information at each step here, and end up back where you started.
It seems to me that the importance/tractability/neglectedness framework is more useful when you have a good sense of a cause’s overall importance but you don’t know about its importance on margin—factoring in tractability and neglectedness helps you understand the value of marginal investment.
This strikes me as a weird way to go about it. You’re essentially taking your best estimate about how effective a cause is, breaking out its effectiveness into three separate factors, and then re-combining those three factors to estimate its effectiveness. You’re going to lose information at each step here, and end up back where you started.
It seems to me that the importance/tractability/neglectedness framework is more useful when you have a good sense of a cause’s overall importance but you don’t know about its importance on margin—factoring in tractability and neglectedness helps you understand the value of marginal investment.