Four modes of thinking about cause prioritization
If you want to improve the world in big way, where shall you invest first? The process of coming up with areas and projects for improvement and ranking them is called by effective altruists “cause prioritization”. Cause is an area like farm animal suffering. And we can use various ways how to compare the need of investment among various causes. And these can be matched with four ways of thinking — on the horizontal axis 1. Sequence Thinking (a sequence of arguments and assumptions that can run wild and get us to concepts like “whole brain emulations”) versus 2. Cluster Thinking (kind of mental parliament negotiating between various theories and approaches in order to limit the tendency to go into extremes based upon one theory like in Sequence Thinking).
And on the vertical axis 3. Analytic Thinking (animal suffering analyzed further as farm animal suffering and wild animal suffering, etc.) versus 4. Synthetic Thinking (Finding common patterns or systemic bottlenecks — see a related approach of Systemic Thinking).
These are four tools for cause prioritization that I so far stumbled upon:
1. Importance-Tractability-Neglectedness Framework — if a certain cause is more important (e.g. kills 100x more people annually) we shall prioritize it among other candidate causes that kill much less people. Or if the cause is more neglected (gets 100x less attention and funding) and/or if the cause is more solvable (e.g. half of the problem can go away if we double the investment in the cause). You can rate and rank various causes on these three criteria, using something akin to a Richter earthquake scale and then sum up the points.
2. Cost — Benefit Analyses represent a single criterion — value for money in terms of dollars invested versus benefits. For example, Copenhagen Consensus assembles economists to calculate cost-benefit estimates of various interventions, like salt iodization versus expansion of vocational training in poorer countries.
3. Theory of Constraints — where is the biggest bottleneck in the system?
Theory of constraints originates from manufacturing and can be applied to knowledge work. The conclusion of ToC is quite counterintuitive — only the action on the bottleneck matters and people should reduce efforts in other places, otherwise they will make the situation worse(!). Take a café owner who wants to increase revenue. No matter what interior design changes he comes up with, nothing will change if the bottleneck is the slow cash register. Because this sets a daily limit of customers that can be served and changes in interior design won’t make the revenue grow, because there is a limit on them posed by the cash register speed. If you want to read more about Theory of Constrains — this is a good place to start.
4. Network theory — what are the most connected nodes in the network of causes?
This is a recent World Bank paper with some interesting application of network theory in prioritization of Sustainable Development Goals with counter-intuitive conclusions for people used to reasoning along the lines of cost-benefit estimates, like the ones by Copenhagen Consensus. In short, goals like affordable clean energy and sanitation are central to many of the Sustainable Development Goals and can thus increase probabilities of their achievement.
ToC and Network Theory approaches seem intuitively similar and they also seem to apply synthetic/systemic thinking. The ITN Framework seems similar to (horizontal) cluster thinking (because it combines various criteria). Cost-benefit analysis seem to attract analytic thinking that chases after “low-hanging fruits”.
Network theory of prioritization makes the trade-off explicit — a country can pursue “low-hanging fruits first” strategy, but it might as a result reduce probability of achieving more goals (like Sustainable Development Goals) in the more long-term future. As if the country pursued (also) goals that are more interconnected (seems similar idea to bottleneck). So there is a trade-off and countries should balance both approaches.
There is a use for each of the four types of thinking shortly outlined in a rather limited and speculative manner. But it would be wise to combine them and don’t rely too much on only one way of thinking — as it might be counterproductive after one loses a good sense of measure.
