welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: The ITN framework, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritisation, published by John G. Halstead on the effective altruism forum. Write a Review From reading EA material, one might get the impression that the Importance, Tractability and Neglectedness (ITN) framework is the (1) only, or (2) best way to prioritise causes. For example, in EA concepts’ two entries on cause prioritisation, the ITN framework is put forward as the only or leading way to prioritise causes. Will MacAskill’s recent TedTalk leaned heavily on the ITN framework as the way to make cause prioritisation decisions. Open Philanthropy Project explicitly prioritises causes using an informal version of the ITN framework. In this post, I argue that: Extant versions of the ITN framework are subject to conceptual problems. A new version of the ITN framework, developed here, is preferable to extant versions. Non-ITN cost-effectiveness analysis is, when workable, superior to ITN analysis for the purposes of cause prioritisation. This is because: Marginal cost-effectiveness is what we ultimately care about. If we can estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of work on a cause without estimating the total scale of a problem or its neglectedness, then we should do that, in order to save time. Marginal cost-effectiveness analysis does not require the assumption of diminishing marginal returns, which may not characterise all problems. ITN analysis may be useful when it is difficult to produce intuitions about the marginal cost-effectiveness of work on a problem. In that case, we can make progress by zooming out and carrying out an ITN analysis. In difficult high stakes cause prioritisation decisions, we have to get into the weeds and consider in-depth the arguments for and against different problems being cost-effective to work on. We cannot bypass this process through simple mechanistic scoring and aggregation of the three ITN factors. For this reason, the EA movement has thus far significantly over-relied on the ITN framework as a way to prioritise causes. For high stakes cause prioritisation decisions, we should move towards in-depth analysis of marginal cost-effectiveness. [update - my footnotes didn't transfer from the googledoc, so I am adding them now] 1. Outlining the ITN framework Importance, tractability and neglectedness are three factors which are widely held to be correlated with cost-effectiveness; if one cause is more important, tractable and neglected than another, then it is likely to be more cost-effective to work on, on the margin. ITN analyses are meant to be useful when it is difficult to estimate directly the cost-effectiveness of work on different causes. Informal and formal versions of the ITN framework tend to define importance and neglectedness in the same way. As we will see below, they differ on how to define tractability. Importance or scale = the overall badness of a problem, or correspondingly, how good it would be to solve it. So for example, the importance of malaria is given by the total health burden it imposes, which you could measure in terms of a health or welfare metric like DALYs. Neglectedness = the total amount of resources or attention a problem currently receives. So for example, a good proxy for the neglectedness of malaria is the total amount of money that currently goes towards dealing with the disease.[^1] Extant informal definitions of tractability Tractability is harder to define and harder to quantify than importance and neglectedness. In informal versions of the framework, tractability is sometimes defined in terms of cost-effectiveness. However, this does not make that much sense because, as mentioned, the ITN framework is meant to be most useful when it is difficult to estimate the marginal cost-effectiveness of work on a particular cause. There would be no reas...