I’m partially sympathetic to this. However, I think EAs have got a bit hung up on ‘neglectedness’ to the extent it’s got in the way of clear thinking: if lots of people are doing something, and you can make them do it slightly better, then working on non-neglected things is promising. Really, I think you need to judge the ‘facts on the grounds’, what you can do, and go from there. If there aren’t ruthlessly impact-focused types working on a problem, that would a good heuristic for some such people to get stuck in.
What was salient to me, compared to when I knew very little of the topic, is how much larger the expected value of drug legalisation now seems.
I think this is an example of where it may be helpful to move from the importance-tractability-neglectedness (INT) framework for selecting cause areas to looking more narrowly at the possible actions (or categories thereof, such as “voting; donating to political campaign groups; arguing for this in the public sphere/on social media; etc.”) through the TUILS framework I’ve written about. The TUILS framework uses “trajectory/uniqueness” instead of “neglectedness”, which means that it doesn’t assume that the more neglected a cause/action is the better it is.
What I think the three different replies to this comment indicate is that crudely thinking “how many resources go to this thing?” is, in itself, neither necessary nor sufficient to deem something a high priority. We need a fuller story about the nature of the problem, it’s scale, potential solutions, obstacles, and the rest. I don’t think anyone has tried to do that for this issue, which is why I’d like someone to dig into it.
This strikes me as an issue where it’s not obviously high priority, but because it’s not obvious, it is worth researching further to see if it is.
I think that’s fair but I also think that non-neglectedness is actually bad for two reasons:
Diminishing returns (which may not be the case if people are solving the problem poorly)
Crowdedness meaning it’s harder to change direction even if people are solving the problem poorly (although this point is really tractability so one needs to be careful about not double-counting when doing ITN).
I’m thinking number 2 could be quite relevant in this case. Admittedly it’s quite relevant for any EA intervention that involves systemic change, but I get the impression that other systemic change interventions may be even higher in importance.
I think this starts to get at questions of tractability, i.e. how neglected is this contingent on tractability (and vice versa). In my mind this is one of the big challenges of any kind of policy work where there’s already a decent number of folks in the space: you have to have reasonably high confidence that you can do better than everyone else is doing now (and not just that you have an idea for how to do better, but like can actually succeed in executing better) in order for it to cross the bar of a sufficiently effective intervention (in expectation) to be worth working on.
I think the steelman of the neglectedness argument would be something like: “The less neglected something is, the less likely it is that we would be able to make them do it slightly better.”
This is both because (a) it is harder to change the direction of the movement and (b) it is harder to genuinely find meaningful ways to improve the movement.
In (b), I wonder if there are some specific limitations of the current War-on-Drugs movement that would match the skills/interests of (some) EAs.
Making therapeutic or life-improving drugs more available
Freeing up tax money for other purposes
Decreasing punishment
Decreasing revenue for terrorists and other bad actors
This seems to be a cause where partial success is meaningful. Every reduction in unnecessary imprisonment, tax dollar saved, and terrorist cell put out of business is a win. We also have some roughly sliding scales—the level of enforcement priority, gradations of legality (research vs medical vs recreational, decriminalization vs legalization), and treatment of offenders (informal social norms vs warnings vs treatment/fines vs jail).
So this suggests to me that neglectedness is relevant in this case. How relevant seems like a detailed question. But given that there’s a fair amount of short-term self-interested incentives to legalize drugs, it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this would be a target for EAs relative to, say, animal suffering.
I’m partially sympathetic to this. However, I think EAs have got a bit hung up on ‘neglectedness’ to the extent it’s got in the way of clear thinking: if lots of people are doing something, and you can make them do it slightly better, then working on non-neglected things is promising. Really, I think you need to judge the ‘facts on the grounds’, what you can do, and go from there. If there aren’t ruthlessly impact-focused types working on a problem, that would a good heuristic for some such people to get stuck in.
What was salient to me, compared to when I knew very little of the topic, is how much larger the expected value of drug legalisation now seems.
[Incoming shameless self-promotion]
I think this is an example of where it may be helpful to move from the importance-tractability-neglectedness (INT) framework for selecting cause areas to looking more narrowly at the possible actions (or categories thereof, such as “voting; donating to political campaign groups; arguing for this in the public sphere/on social media; etc.”) through the TUILS framework I’ve written about. The TUILS framework uses “trajectory/uniqueness” instead of “neglectedness”, which means that it doesn’t assume that the more neglected a cause/action is the better it is.
What I think the three different replies to this comment indicate is that crudely thinking “how many resources go to this thing?” is, in itself, neither necessary nor sufficient to deem something a high priority. We need a fuller story about the nature of the problem, it’s scale, potential solutions, obstacles, and the rest. I don’t think anyone has tried to do that for this issue, which is why I’d like someone to dig into it.
This strikes me as an issue where it’s not obviously high priority, but because it’s not obvious, it is worth researching further to see if it is.
I think that’s fair but I also think that non-neglectedness is actually bad for two reasons:
Diminishing returns (which may not be the case if people are solving the problem poorly)
Crowdedness meaning it’s harder to change direction even if people are solving the problem poorly (although this point is really tractability so one needs to be careful about not double-counting when doing ITN).
I’m thinking number 2 could be quite relevant in this case. Admittedly it’s quite relevant for any EA intervention that involves systemic change, but I get the impression that other systemic change interventions may be even higher in importance.
I think this starts to get at questions of tractability, i.e. how neglected is this contingent on tractability (and vice versa). In my mind this is one of the big challenges of any kind of policy work where there’s already a decent number of folks in the space: you have to have reasonably high confidence that you can do better than everyone else is doing now (and not just that you have an idea for how to do better, but like can actually succeed in executing better) in order for it to cross the bar of a sufficiently effective intervention (in expectation) to be worth working on.
I think the steelman of the neglectedness argument would be something like: “The less neglected something is, the less likely it is that we would be able to make them do it slightly better.”
This is both because (a) it is harder to change the direction of the movement and (b) it is harder to genuinely find meaningful ways to improve the movement.
In (b), I wonder if there are some specific limitations of the current War-on-Drugs movement that would match the skills/interests of (some) EAs.
Here’s a list of critiques of the ITN framework many of which involve critiques of the neglectedness criterion.
Ending the war on drugs has a few obvious goods:
Making therapeutic or life-improving drugs more available
Freeing up tax money for other purposes
Decreasing punishment
Decreasing revenue for terrorists and other bad actors
This seems to be a cause where partial success is meaningful. Every reduction in unnecessary imprisonment, tax dollar saved, and terrorist cell put out of business is a win. We also have some roughly sliding scales—the level of enforcement priority, gradations of legality (research vs medical vs recreational, decriminalization vs legalization), and treatment of offenders (informal social norms vs warnings vs treatment/fines vs jail).
So this suggests to me that neglectedness is relevant in this case. How relevant seems like a detailed question. But given that there’s a fair amount of short-term self-interested incentives to legalize drugs, it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this would be a target for EAs relative to, say, animal suffering.