In my post I am arguing for an output metric rather than an input metric.
But this doesn’t make any sense. It suggests that if a problem is (a) severe and (b) insuperable, we should pour all our effort into it forever, achieving nothing in the process.
The impact equation in Owen Cotton-Barratt’s Prospecting for Gold might be helpful here. Note that his term for neglectedness (what he calls uncrowdedness) depends only on the amount of (useful) work that has already been done, not the value of a solution or the elasticity of progress with work (i.e. tractability). (We can generalise from “work done” to “resources spent”, where effort is one resource you can spend on a problem.)
Now, you can get into the weeds here with exactly what kinds of work count for the purposes of determining crowdedness (presumably you need to downweight in inverse proportion to how well-directed the work is), but I think even under the strictest reasonable definitions the amount of work that has gone into attacking climate change is “a very great deal”.
I can think of some other arguments you might make, around the shape and scale of the first two terms in Owen’s equation, to argue that marginal work put into climate change is still valuable, but none of them depend on redefining neglectedness.
But this doesn’t make any sense. It suggests that if a problem is (a) severe and (b) insuperable, we should pour all our effort into it forever, achieving nothing in the process.
The impact equation in Owen Cotton-Barratt’s Prospecting for Gold might be helpful here. Note that his term for neglectedness (what he calls uncrowdedness) depends only on the amount of (useful) work that has already been done, not the value of a solution or the elasticity of progress with work (i.e. tractability). (We can generalise from “work done” to “resources spent”, where effort is one resource you can spend on a problem.)
Now, you can get into the weeds here with exactly what kinds of work count for the purposes of determining crowdedness (presumably you need to downweight in inverse proportion to how well-directed the work is), but I think even under the strictest reasonable definitions the amount of work that has gone into attacking climate change is “a very great deal”.
I can think of some other arguments you might make, around the shape and scale of the first two terms in Owen’s equation, to argue that marginal work put into climate change is still valuable, but none of them depend on redefining neglectedness.