MichaelA🔸 comments on Why and how to be excited about megaprojects

[MichaelA🔸]

I agree with your final three paragraphs, but:

1. You seem to be implying that Scalability was one of the terms in ITN/​SSN, which I think it never was.

   1. The Ss have been Scale and Solvability, which aren’t the same as Scalability

   2. iirc, Charity Entrepreneurship does account for scalability in their own weighted factor models or frameworks, but that’s separate from ITN

2. I don’t think the ITN/​SSN frameworks made the points in my post or in your final three paragraphs clear.

   1. Those are primarilyframeworks for prioritizing among problems, not projects.

   2. “if we doubled the resources dedicated to solving this problem, what fraction of the problem would we expect to solve?” doesn’t tell me how scalable a given project is. “resources dedicated to solving this problem” would mean things like total resources dedicated to solving wild animal suffering or extreme climate change risks, not resources dedicated toward a given project.

      1. You could have cases where a given project could grow to 100 times its current size without losing much cost-effectiveness per dollar and yet the cost-effectiveness was fairly low to begin with or the problem area it’s related to isn’t very tractable.

      2. You could also have cases where a project is very cost-effective and is in a very tractable area but isn’t very scalable.

   3. Scale, Tractability, and Neglectedness are also often used to evaluate intervention or project ideas, but in that case Scale is used to mean things like “How big would the impacts be if the project were successful?” or “How big a problem is this aiming to tackle?”, rather than things like “How large can this project grow to while remaining somewhat cost-effective?”

[jh]

Yes, what I was trying to say was that in my opinion the word ‘Scalability’ is a good match for 80′000 Hours stated definition of Solvability. In practice, Solvability and Tractability are not used as if they represent Scalability. I think this is a shame as: a) I think Scalability makes sense given the mathematical intuition for ITN developed by Owen Cotton-Barratt, and b) I think there is a risk of circular logic in how people use Solvability/​Tractability (e.g. they judge them based on a sense of the marginal cost-effectiveness of work on a problem).

I agree that ITN/​SSN are clearly framed as frameworks for problems not projects.

I agree with your examples in your point 2. I’m not sure if you’re making a larger point though? For projects we can just define scalability as: “if we doubled the resources dedicated to this project, by what fraction would we increase its impact?”.

Regarding your point 3, for me “How big would the impacts be if the project were successful?” and “How large can this project grow to while remaining somewhat cost-effective?” are the same thing in practice. That is, my natural instinct is to define success as expanding to the limits of reasonable cost-effectiveness. I would say this is scale at the ‘solution-level’.

“How big a problem is this aiming to tackle?” is different, of course, as it’s at the ‘problem level’.

By the way, you can also define scale as “How much impact has this project had so far?”.

However you define Scale if you then divided it by the amount resources invested to achieve that scale, you’ll get an ‘average’ cost-effectiveness. But, to get the marginal cost-effectiveness you need to factor in Scalability, because as the project grows its impact per unit will generally be declining. Whether we call the marginal value being closer to the average good ‘solvability’ or good ‘scalability’ seems like a matter of taste.

In any case, my goal with these comments is mostly just to agree that Scalability is important.