Thanks for the comment. I agree that considering the marginal value of information is important. This may be another source of diminishing marginal total value (where total value = direct impact + value of information). It seems, though, that this is also subject to the same criticism I outline in the post. If other funders also know that neglected causes give more valuable information at the margin, then the link between neglectedness and marginal value will be weakened. The important step, then, is to determine whether other funders are considering the value of information when making decisions. This may vary by context.
Also, could you give me some more justification for why we would expect the value of information to be higher for neglected causes? That doesn’t seem obvious to me. I realize that you might learn more by trying new things, but it seems that what you learn would be more valuable if there were a lot of other funders that could act on the new information (so the information would be more valuable in crowded cause areas like climate change).
On your second point, I agree that when you’re deciding between causes and you’re confident that other funders of these causes have no significant information that you don’t, and you’re confident that there are diminishing returns, then we would expect for neglectedness to be a good signal of marginal impact. Maybe this is a common situation to be in for EA-type causes, but I’m not so sure. A lot of the causes on 80,000 Hours’ page are fairly mainstream (climate change, global development, nuclear security), so a lot of other smart people have thought about them. Alternatively, in cases where we can be confident that other funders are poorly informed or irrational, there’s the worry about increasing returns to scale.
I think the argument is that additional information showing that a cause has high marginal impact might divert causes away towards it from causes with less marginal impact. And getting this kind of information does seem more likely for causes without a track record allowing for a somewhat robust estimation of their (marginal) impact.
This is essentially what I was thinking. If we’re to discover that the “best” intervention is something that we aren’t funding much now, we’ll need to look closer at interventions which are currently neglected.
I agree with the author that neglectedness isn’t a perfect measure, since others may already have examined them and been unimpressed, but I don’t know how often that “previous examination” actually happens (probably not too often, given the low number of organizations within EA that conduct in-depth research on causes). I’d still think that many neglected causes have received very little serious attention, especially attention toward the most up-to-date research (maybe GiveWell said no five years ago, but five years is a lot of time for new evidence to emerge).
(As I mentioned in another comment, I wish we knew more about which interventions EA orgs had considered but decided not to fund; that knowledge is the easiest way I can think of to figure out whether or not an idea really is “neglected”.)
Thanks for the comment. I agree that considering the marginal value of information is important. This may be another source of diminishing marginal total value (where total value = direct impact + value of information). It seems, though, that this is also subject to the same criticism I outline in the post. If other funders also know that neglected causes give more valuable information at the margin, then the link between neglectedness and marginal value will be weakened. The important step, then, is to determine whether other funders are considering the value of information when making decisions. This may vary by context.
Also, could you give me some more justification for why we would expect the value of information to be higher for neglected causes? That doesn’t seem obvious to me. I realize that you might learn more by trying new things, but it seems that what you learn would be more valuable if there were a lot of other funders that could act on the new information (so the information would be more valuable in crowded cause areas like climate change).
On your second point, I agree that when you’re deciding between causes and you’re confident that other funders of these causes have no significant information that you don’t, and you’re confident that there are diminishing returns, then we would expect for neglectedness to be a good signal of marginal impact. Maybe this is a common situation to be in for EA-type causes, but I’m not so sure. A lot of the causes on 80,000 Hours’ page are fairly mainstream (climate change, global development, nuclear security), so a lot of other smart people have thought about them. Alternatively, in cases where we can be confident that other funders are poorly informed or irrational, there’s the worry about increasing returns to scale.
I think the argument is that additional information showing that a cause has high marginal impact might divert causes away towards it from causes with less marginal impact. And getting this kind of information does seem more likely for causes without a track record allowing for a somewhat robust estimation of their (marginal) impact.
This is essentially what I was thinking. If we’re to discover that the “best” intervention is something that we aren’t funding much now, we’ll need to look closer at interventions which are currently neglected.
I agree with the author that neglectedness isn’t a perfect measure, since others may already have examined them and been unimpressed, but I don’t know how often that “previous examination” actually happens (probably not too often, given the low number of organizations within EA that conduct in-depth research on causes). I’d still think that many neglected causes have received very little serious attention, especially attention toward the most up-to-date research (maybe GiveWell said no five years ago, but five years is a lot of time for new evidence to emerge).
(As I mentioned in another comment, I wish we knew more about which interventions EA orgs had considered but decided not to fund; that knowledge is the easiest way I can think of to figure out whether or not an idea really is “neglected”.)