INT has its uses, but I believe many people over-apply it.
Generally speaking (with some exceptions), people don’t choose between causes, they choose between interventions. That is, they don’t prioritize broad focus areas like global poverty or immigration reform. Instead, they choose to support specific interventions such as distributing deworming treatments or lobbying to pass an immigration bill. The INT framework doesn’t apply to interventions as well as it does to causes. In short, cause areas correspond to problems, and interventions correspond to solutions; INT assesses problems, not solutions.
(aside: Michael Plant makes the same point in chapters 5 & 6 of his PhD thesis as per Edo Arad’s post, using it as a starting point to develop a systematic cause prio approach he called ‘cause mapping’)
In most cases, we can try to directly assess the true marginal impact of investing in an intervention. These assessments will never be perfectly accurate, but they generally seem to tell us more than INT does. …
How can we estimate an intervention’s impact more directly? To develop a better framework, let’s start with the final result we want and work backward to see how to get it.
Dickens’ post has more; the framework they end up with is this:
which (somewhat less practically, they note) could be fine-grained further:
I also appreciated that Dickens actually used this framework to guide their giving decision (more details in their post).
Michael Dickens’ 2016 post Evaluation Frameworks (or: When Importance / Neglectedness / Tractability Doesn’t Apply) makes the following point I think is useful to keep in mind as a corrective:
(aside: Michael Plant makes the same point in chapters 5 & 6 of his PhD thesis as per Edo Arad’s post, using it as a starting point to develop a systematic cause prio approach he called ‘cause mapping’)
Dickens’ post has more; the framework they end up with is this:
which (somewhat less practically, they note) could be fine-grained further:
I also appreciated that Dickens actually used this framework to guide their giving decision (more details in their post).