My understanding of these terms is roughly as follows:
Scale: general size of the problem. Determines the upper bound of what can be achieved. Determining the scale of a problem is quite arbitrary, because how do you draw the boundaries of ‘the problem’ and when is it completely solved?
Tractability: determines the average or global cost-effectiveness if you don’t know where you are on the curve (i.e. if you don’t know how much of the problem has been solved so far). Higher tractability means that the curve is steeper on average.
Neglectedness: determines the location on the curve and gets you the marginal or local cost-effectiveness. Because we expect the value curve to have diminishing returns, a good heuristic is ‘more neglected --> higher marginal value.’
I think where EA’s go repeatedly wrong with the application of the model is that tractability and neglectedness get confused: tractability should refer to solving the complete problem. If it refers to marginal tractability, then it double counts the neglectedness consideration. The report seems to do this:
Public clean energy R&D is neglected: only $22 billion is spent per year globally. Many advanced economies such as the US could unilaterally increase this substantially i.e. even without international coordination—which makes this policy uniquely politically tractable.
Here, neglectedness is taken as a reason for tractability, while it should be a reason for marginal cost-effectiveness.
The SNT-model is also much more helpful for funding than for career choice, because neglectedness has linear implications for the value of extra funding, but more complex implications for an extra person doing work. Some skills are not very useful in the early stage of a cause area or problem, but become valuable only later. In general, I think personal fit is very important, and the SNT-model does not account for it.
I actually hope to write a longer post explaining all this in more detail, including some nice visual explanation I have of the SNT-model.
Here, neglectedness is taken as a reason for tractability, while it should be a reason for marginal cost-effectiveness.
No sorry that’s incorrect. These are two separate points.
Clean energy R&D is neglected because only $22 billion globannually are invested—Norway could in theory triple this if they wanted to and it would have a very large effect on global emissions.
Carbon taxes are also neglected. But if Norway were to implement a carbon tax the effect on global emissions would be tiny.
Increasing public clean energy R&D does not necessarily require strong multilateralism or harmonized national policies. This makes it very tractable politically and uniquely positioned in the space of all climate policies as a decentralized approach.
Even if clean energy R&D spending would be relatively higher (say 100 billion), it might still be more tractable for a small country to increase it than to implementing carbon taxes.
Ah, I assumed the latter was a consequence of the former because they were in the same paragraph, my bad.
However, like Michael, I’m still a bit confused about the role neglectedness is playing in this analysis (and all other analyses). But don’t take that as criticism of your analysis. It often seems that neglectedness and tractability (and scale) are used as independent reasons to support a particular cause area or intervention, rather than that they are used as a coherent framework. It seems to me your argument would have been similarly strong if clean energy R&D was not neglected—if you could just show that additional spending would have big benefits.
My understanding of these terms is roughly as follows:
Scale: general size of the problem. Determines the upper bound of what can be achieved. Determining the scale of a problem is quite arbitrary, because how do you draw the boundaries of ‘the problem’ and when is it completely solved?
Tractability: determines the average or global cost-effectiveness if you don’t know where you are on the curve (i.e. if you don’t know how much of the problem has been solved so far). Higher tractability means that the curve is steeper on average.
Neglectedness: determines the location on the curve and gets you the marginal or local cost-effectiveness. Because we expect the value curve to have diminishing returns, a good heuristic is ‘more neglected --> higher marginal value.’
I think where EA’s go repeatedly wrong with the application of the model is that tractability and neglectedness get confused: tractability should refer to solving the complete problem. If it refers to marginal tractability, then it double counts the neglectedness consideration. The report seems to do this:
Here, neglectedness is taken as a reason for tractability, while it should be a reason for marginal cost-effectiveness.
The SNT-model is also much more helpful for funding than for career choice, because neglectedness has linear implications for the value of extra funding, but more complex implications for an extra person doing work. Some skills are not very useful in the early stage of a cause area or problem, but become valuable only later. In general, I think personal fit is very important, and the SNT-model does not account for it.
I actually hope to write a longer post explaining all this in more detail, including some nice visual explanation I have of the SNT-model.
No sorry that’s incorrect. These are two separate points.
Clean energy R&D is neglected because only $22 billion globannually are invested—Norway could in theory triple this if they wanted to and it would have a very large effect on global emissions.
Carbon taxes are also neglected. But if Norway were to implement a carbon tax the effect on global emissions would be tiny.
Increasing public clean energy R&D does not necessarily require strong multilateralism or harmonized national policies. This makes it very tractable politically and uniquely positioned in the space of all climate policies as a decentralized approach.
Even if clean energy R&D spending would be relatively higher (say 100 billion), it might still be more tractable for a small country to increase it than to implementing carbon taxes.
Ah, I assumed the latter was a consequence of the former because they were in the same paragraph, my bad.
However, like Michael, I’m still a bit confused about the role neglectedness is playing in this analysis (and all other analyses). But don’t take that as criticism of your analysis. It often seems that neglectedness and tractability (and scale) are used as independent reasons to support a particular cause area or intervention, rather than that they are used as a coherent framework. It seems to me your argument would have been similarly strong if clean energy R&D was not neglected—if you could just show that additional spending would have big benefits.