Hello michael. This feels like going too far in an anti-ITN direction. On the scores going to infinity point, this feels like an edge case where things break down rather than something which renders the framework useless. Price elasticities also have this feature for example, but still seem useful.
On defining a problem, there have to be restrictions on what you are comparing in order to make the framework useful. Nevertheless, it does seem that there is a meaningful sense in which we can compare eg malaria and diabetes in terms of scale and neglectedness, and that this could be a useful comparison to make.
Overall, I do think the ITN framework can be useful sometimes. If you knew nothing else about two problems aside from their importance and neglectedness and one was very important and neglected and one was not, then that would indeed be a reason to favour the former. Sometimes, problems will dominate others in terms of the three criteria considered at low resolution, and there the framework will again be useful.
Where I have my doubts is in it being used to make decisions in the hard high stakes cases. There, we need to use the best available arguments on marginal cost-effectiveness, not this very zoomed out perspective. eg we need to discuss whether technical AI safety research can indeed make progress.
Hello michael. This feels like going too far in an anti-ITN direction. On the scores going to infinity point, this feels like an edge case where things break down rather than something which renders the framework useless. Price elasticities also have this feature for example, but still seem useful.
On defining a problem, there have to be restrictions on what you are comparing in order to make the framework useful. Nevertheless, it does seem that there is a meaningful sense in which we can compare eg malaria and diabetes in terms of scale and neglectedness, and that this could be a useful comparison to make.
Overall, I do think the ITN framework can be useful sometimes. If you knew nothing else about two problems aside from their importance and neglectedness and one was very important and neglected and one was not, then that would indeed be a reason to favour the former. Sometimes, problems will dominate others in terms of the three criteria considered at low resolution, and there the framework will again be useful.
Where I have my doubts is in it being used to make decisions in the hard high stakes cases. There, we need to use the best available arguments on marginal cost-effectiveness, not this very zoomed out perspective. eg we need to discuss whether technical AI safety research can indeed make progress.