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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: Prioritization when size matters, published by jh on January 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: I describe some key considerations for prioritization when the potential size of a funding opportunity matters (i.e. its 'room for more funding'). I show how this relates to the ITN framework and I propose new prioritization components, including 'Scalability', as clarification of Tractability, and several different components of 'Neglectedness'. It would be nice if all we needed to know when prioritizing funding opportunities was their marginal good per dollar. In reality, funders always need to make two decisions: what to fund and how much. Research, evaluation and execution takes time and effort. When we find a great opportunity we should be even more thrilled if we can put many dollars into it rather than just one. Scalability matters. However, if we start throwing a lot of dollars at an opportunity then other funders are going to react. Coordination is hard and our dollars are likely to crowd out or 'funge' others. The extent to which this is an issue depends, among other things, on the Neglectedness of the opportunity. These considerations, and others, arise when we think about the interaction of our funding decisions with others (i.e. as part of an 'equilibrium'). They are even more relevant when we have the ability to put so much funding into an opportunity that it changes the opportunity itself (i.e. is 'non-marginal'). In this post I share a framework that we have developed at the Total Portfolio Project (TPP) to account for these considerations. I'll refer to this as the 'framework'. But, note that it's just one tool among many that we think are useful for assessing opportunities. We developed this framework out of necessity because of our goal to develop tools for prioritization that work across a wide range of funding opportunities. And when size matters. Now, with the increasing wealth and ambitions of EA, it seems like these considerations are more relevant than ever to the community at large. Comments, questions and feedback are very welcome. See this post's twin for an explanation of both ITN and TPP's framework using a mathematical model. Review of ITN The Importance, Tractability and Neglectedness (ITN) style frameworks are important tools for estimating the 'value of allocating marginal resources to a problem'. 80,000 hours describes the components of their ITN-style framework as follows: Importance - If we solved the problem, how good would it be? Tractability - If we doubled the resources dedicated to solving this problem, what fraction of the problem would we expect to solve? Neglectedness - How many resources are already going towards solving this problem? I think these are the right questions, when interpreted carefully, for assessing the value of adding marginal resources to a problem. However, there is a good deal of confusion and disagreement about how the components should be assessed in practice (e.g. see most of the posts here). Diversity of thought is a good thing. But it seems like many of these disagreements are unnecessary. Differences of opinion, confusion and debate applies to all three ITN components. But, in my experience, it applies the most to Neglectedness. As noted here: "Ideally, we would like to not simply select causes that are neglected, but select causes that are neglected for reasons other than their impact." I think these issues are a symptom of ITN not addressing the question of why an opportunity exists in the first place. Thinking about impact in 'equilibrium' requires tackling this question. So, it is a valuable exercise just on this count alone. It also naturally leads to multiple considerations that capture different aspects of what we might mean by 'neglectedness'. Equilibrium effects TPP's framework can...