EA - There can be highly neglected solutions to less-neglected problems by Linda Linsefors

Link to original articleWelcome 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: There can be highly neglected solutions to less-neglected problems, published by Linda Linsefors on February 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is based on an old draft that I wrote years ago, but never quite finished. The specific references might be a bit outdated, but think the main point is still relevant.Thanks to Amber Dawn Ace for turning my draft into something worth posting.EAs are often interested in how ‘neglected’ problems are: that is, how much money is being spent on solving them, and/or how many people are working on them. 80,000 Hours, for example, prioritizes pressing problems using a version of the importance, tractability, neglectedness (ITN) framework, where a problem’s ‘neglectedness’ is one of three factors that determine how much we should prioritize it relative to other problems.80,000 Hours define neglectedness as:“How many people, or dollars, are currently being dedicated to solving the problem?I suggest that a better definition would be:“How many people, or dollars, are currently being dedicated to this particular solution?”I think it makes more sense to assess solutions for neglectedness, rather than problems. Sometimes, a problem is not neglected, but effective solutions to that problem are neglected. A lot of people are working on the problem and a lot of money is being spent on it, but in ineffective (or less effective) ways.Here’s the example that 80,000 Hours uses to illustrate neglectedness:“[M]ass immunisation of children is an extremely effective intervention to improve global health, but it is already being vigorously pursued by governments and several major foundations, including the Gates Foundation. This makes it less likely to be a top opportunity for future donors.”Note that mass immunisation of children is a solution, not a problem. But it makes sense for 80K to think about this: we can imagine a world in which charities spent just as much money on preventing or curing diseases, but they spent it on less effective solutions. In that world, even though global disease would not be a neglected problem, mass vaccination would be a neglected (effective) solution, and it would make sense for donors to prioritize it.There’s something fractal about solutions and problems. Every solution to a problem presents its own problem: how best to implement it. Mass vaccination is an effective solution to the problem of disease. But then there’s the problem of ‘how can we best achieve mass vaccination?’. And solutions to that problem - for example, different methods of vaccine distribution, or interventions to address vaccine skepticism - pose their own, more granular problems.Here’s another example: hundreds of millions of dollars is spent each year on preventing nuclear war and nuclear winter. However, only a small fraction of this is spent on interventions intended to mitigate the negative impacts of nuclear winter - for example, ALLFED’s work researching food sources that are not dependent on sunlight. But in the event that there is a nuclear winter, these sorts of interventions will be extremely effective: they’ll enable us to produce much more food, so far fewer people will starve. Mitigation interventions are thus a highly neglected class of solutions for a problem - nuclear war - that is comparatively less neglected.As another example: climate change is not a neglected problem. But different solutions get very different amounts of attention. One of the most effective interventions seems to be preserving the rainforests (and other bodies of biomass), yet only a lonely few organizations (e.g. Cool Earth and the Carbon Fund) are working on this.Evaluating the neglectedness of solutions has its own problems. It means that neglectedness no longer lines up so neatly with solvability/tractability and scale/import...