I agree that all that really matters is how effective a particular intervention will be in reducing suffering for the amount of money you plan to donate. Other metrics (especially neglectedness) are just heuristics.
I think it’s unfortunate we used the word “importance” for one of the factors, since it could also be understood to mean overall how valuable it is to work on something. I think many use the word “scale” now instead for the factor.
If you prioritized by scale only, then you can make a problem arbitrarily large in scale, to the point of uselessness, e.g. “prevent all future suffering”.
Presumably wild animal suffering is also much greater in scale than factory farming (or at least the suffering of the farmed animals, setting other effects aside), but it receives much less support since, in part, so far, it seems much less tractable. (Wild animal welfare is still a legitimate cause, though, and it does get support. Wild Animal Initiative was just recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.)
Ah, okay. So tractability is built into the term “most important”?
I thought they were two separate concepts: https://concepts.effectivealtruism.org/concepts/importance-neglectedness-tractability/
I agree that all that really matters is how effective a particular intervention will be in reducing suffering for the amount of money you plan to donate. Other metrics (especially neglectedness) are just heuristics.
I think it’s unfortunate we used the word “importance” for one of the factors, since it could also be understood to mean overall how valuable it is to work on something. I think many use the word “scale” now instead for the factor.
If you prioritized by scale only, then you can make a problem arbitrarily large in scale, to the point of uselessness, e.g. “prevent all future suffering”.
Presumably wild animal suffering is also much greater in scale than factory farming (or at least the suffering of the farmed animals, setting other effects aside), but it receives much less support since, in part, so far, it seems much less tractable. (Wild animal welfare is still a legitimate cause, though, and it does get support. Wild Animal Initiative was just recommended as a top charity by Animal Charity Evaluators.)