I should just flag I’ve put a post on this topic on the forum too, albeit one that doesn’t directly reply to John but addressed many of the points raised in the OP and in the comments.
I will make a direct reply to John on one issue. He suggests we should:
We quantify importance to neglectedness ratios for different problems.
(that’s supposed to be in quotation marks but they seem not be working).
I don’t think this is a useful heuristic and I don’t see problems which are higher scale:neglectedness should be higher priority. There are two issues with this. One is that problems with no resources going towards them will score infinitely highly on this schema. Another is that delineating one ‘problem’ from another is arbitrary anyway.
Let’s illustrate what happens when we put these together. Suppose we’re talking about the cause of reducing poverty and, suppose further, it happens to be the case that it’s just as cost-effective to help one poor person as another. As a cause, quite a lot of money goes to poverty and let’s assume poverty scores badly (relative to our other causes) on this scale/neglectedness rating. I pick out person P, who is currently not receiving any aid and declare that ‘cause P’ – helping person P – is entirely neglected. Cause P now has infinite score on scale/neglectedness and suddenly looks very promising via this heuristic. This is perverse as, by stipulation, helping P is just as cost-effective any helping any other person in poverty.
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.
I should just flag I’ve put a post on this topic on the forum too, albeit one that doesn’t directly reply to John but addressed many of the points raised in the OP and in the comments.
I will make a direct reply to John on one issue. He suggests we should:
We quantify importance to neglectedness ratios for different problems.
(that’s supposed to be in quotation marks but they seem not be working).
I don’t think this is a useful heuristic and I don’t see problems which are higher scale:neglectedness should be higher priority. There are two issues with this. One is that problems with no resources going towards them will score infinitely highly on this schema. Another is that delineating one ‘problem’ from another is arbitrary anyway.
Let’s illustrate what happens when we put these together. Suppose we’re talking about the cause of reducing poverty and, suppose further, it happens to be the case that it’s just as cost-effective to help one poor person as another. As a cause, quite a lot of money goes to poverty and let’s assume poverty scores badly (relative to our other causes) on this scale/neglectedness rating. I pick out person P, who is currently not receiving any aid and declare that ‘cause P’ – helping person P – is entirely neglected. Cause P now has infinite score on scale/neglectedness and suddenly looks very promising via this heuristic. This is perverse as, by stipulation, helping P is just as cost-effective any helping any other person in poverty.
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.