The ITN-framework maps onto cognitive biases
The Importance (or scale), Tractability, Neglectedness (ITN) framework has been wildly popular in Effective Altruism circles for over a decade.It's surprisingly effective, and people still use it a lot (I've heard it mentioned twice today in an AI policy proposal and while listening to a podcast).
I also still apply the framework quite often, and it can even be useful also for personal decision making and you can get a surprising amount of mileage out of it. Often you can quickly set up a spreadsheet, add a bunch of interventions to and then rank them even very roughly (maybe from 1-3) by how impactful they are if you were to do them, how easy it would be to implement them and how neglected they are.
Say you want to improve your physical fitness, you could add 'take creatine' (I:1, T:3, N: 3), set a calendar reminder to put out your gym clothes the night before working out (I:1, T:3, N:3), etc., where neglectedness could even be how often you do that yourself. I've also run into a few people who heard about the ITN framework from EA and applied to in their normal (non-EA) jobs and were quite successful with that.
What's particularly interesting is that the ranking is often quite surprising and unexpected interventions come out on top. Why is that?
80,000 hours has an explainer[1] that provides a mathematical formalization and shows how it essentially can be reduced to cost-effectiveness, or benefit-cost ratios.
This seems fair enough, but then why don't we go straight to the reduced form and do a cost-effectiveness analysis?
There are many reasons (e.g. we often don't have precise dollar amounts of benefits and costs), but there's another somewhat counterintuitive reason I want to highlight: The ITN-framework maps onto cognitive biases
1) Importance/Scale: This maps onto scope insensitivity and also forces you to quantify the benefit no matter how difficult it first appears. Like what is the importance of creatine for improving your physical fitness? Really hard to say but you can maybe at least rank order this: it's probably less impactful than putting out your gym clothes the night before working out if that increases your odds of going to the gym on the order of ~10%. (Similarly, it's often even good to put rough orders of magnitude on things, like $10, $100, $1k, etc. (e.g. when you get into a rabbit hole, e.g. w/ purchasing decisions, it's often useful to ask yourself if it's a just a $10 cost and not worth spending much more time on)).
b) Tractability: This one reduces your tribal biases and nudges you towards 'Pulling the rope' sideways. Yes, it would be very impactful if the NIMBYs would just give in, and yes it would be great if the whole world would just wake up and implement a Universal Basic Income. But is this actually tractable? Maybe, but maybe other policies to reduce rents and inequality are way easier to pull off, because there's less resistance.
For the life improvement exercise example: yes, in theory, the best thing to do might be to do ultra effective HIIT every day, but it's maybe not as fun as group sports. Also, it's surprisingly easy to just pop a pill of creatine (or scoop it directly into your mouth[2]).
c) Neglectedness: It seems like there are a bunch of biases at work here:
- We often like doing what others are already doing, and it comes very natural to us because we have an innate drive to imitate our peers.
- Neglectedness is also related to comparative advantage, which is widely regarded as one of the most powerful, yet counter-intuitive insights in economics.
- Diminishing returns is also sometimes hard to grasp
(Time discounting might also map onto certain biases to do with delay of gratification).
When we then quantify and multiply all of these biases together, what comes out is especially counterintuitive and surprising, because, while we might be able to overcome one of those biases in our minds, it's just too much a stretch for our working memory to keep track of all of this.
You can try this out by ranking all the tips in 'How to get the benefits of moving without moving' or having an LLM rank it.