One of my pet peeves is when a report from e.g., a think tank spends about 80% of the report body describing the problems/situation, then concludes with a ~short segment on “policy recommendations,” which often lacks the kind of basic structured analysis/assumption support that is commonplace in e.g., some high school competitive policy debate leagues.
I’m often not asking for some formalized cost-benefit analysis with e.g., discount rates—especially since some policies/outcomes are not amenable to neat quantification, and some think tank reports are meant to be more exploratory rather than definitive (although if that is the case then the report should not push the policy recommendations so forcefully, IMO). However, I’ve seen many reports where the recommendation section barely considers alternative analysis, and I suspect that this is partially because there is not a Schelling/focal point for audience and writer expectations/norms.
In contrast, various leagues of competitive policy debate (e.g., in high school) have developed norms around concepts like the “stock issues”, which I generalized beyond policy debate in this post. Specifically, for each advantage (or disadvantage) claimed for a given proposal (e.g., “this plan reduces pollution of X and thus saves Y lives”), one should critically consider whether/to what extent:
the outcome would occur counterfactually;
the proposal would be implemented/feasible as described;
a given implementation of the proposal would lead to the outcome; and
how morally significant the outcome is.
Similar to how the importance-tractability-neglectedness framework is common parlance among EAs for broad cause prioritization, I think it would be good to see a similar common framework be developed/used to e.g., check against one’s own biases and break down alleged pros and cons into smaller pieces. And I certainly would like to see more think tank/etc. reports at least toying with questions like “would this proposal actually mitigate the problem (beyond what would counterfactually occur)?”
Re: thoughtful cost benefit analysis:
One of my pet peeves is when a report from e.g., a think tank spends about 80% of the report body describing the problems/situation, then concludes with a ~short segment on “policy recommendations,” which often lacks the kind of basic structured analysis/assumption support that is commonplace in e.g., some high school competitive policy debate leagues.
I’m often not asking for some formalized cost-benefit analysis with e.g., discount rates—especially since some policies/outcomes are not amenable to neat quantification, and some think tank reports are meant to be more exploratory rather than definitive (although if that is the case then the report should not push the policy recommendations so forcefully, IMO). However, I’ve seen many reports where the recommendation section barely considers alternative analysis, and I suspect that this is partially because there is not a Schelling/focal point for audience and writer expectations/norms.
In contrast, various leagues of competitive policy debate (e.g., in high school) have developed norms around concepts like the “stock issues”, which I generalized beyond policy debate in this post. Specifically, for each advantage (or disadvantage) claimed for a given proposal (e.g., “this plan reduces pollution of X and thus saves Y lives”), one should critically consider whether/to what extent:
the outcome would occur counterfactually;
the proposal would be implemented/feasible as described;
a given implementation of the proposal would lead to the outcome; and
how morally significant the outcome is.
Similar to how the importance-tractability-neglectedness framework is common parlance among EAs for broad cause prioritization, I think it would be good to see a similar common framework be developed/used to e.g., check against one’s own biases and break down alleged pros and cons into smaller pieces. And I certainly would like to see more think tank/etc. reports at least toying with questions like “would this proposal actually mitigate the problem (beyond what would counterfactually occur)?”