I am wondering if 80k should publicly speak of the PINT instead of the INT framework (with P for personal fit). This is because I get the impression that the INT framework contributes to generating a reputation hierarchy of cause areas to work on; and many (young) EAs tend to over-emphasize reputation over personal fit, which basically sets them up for failure a couple of years down the line. Putting the "P" in there might help to avoid this.

A way around this problem is to rate each criteria, while 'controlling for' the others.

For example, rather than ask 'how important is this cause?', instead ask 'how important would it be if nobody were doing anything about it?', or 'how important is this cause relative to others that are equally as neglected?'. Rather than ask 'how tractable is this cause on the margin?', instead ask 'how tractable would it be if nobody were working on it?', or 'how tractable is it relative to other causes that are equally neglected?'.

Those questions would be inappropriate if we weren't considering neglectedness separately, but fortunately we are.

This strikes me as a weird way to go about it. You're essentially taking your best estimate about how effective a cause is, breaking out its effectiveness into three separate factors, and then re-combining those three factors to estimate its effectiveness. You're going to lose information at each step here, and end up back where you started.

It seems to me that the importance/tractability/neglectedness framework is more useful when you have a good sense of a cause's overall importance but you don't know about its importance on margin--factoring in tractability and neglectedness helps you understand the value of marginal investment.

Good post. I agree that this framework, though somewhat useful, sometimes seems to be taken as more precise than it is. I've also thought about how it could be improved, but without notable success so far (one problem is that in order to become more precise, you need more criteria, which threatens to make the framework too cumbersome). I also thought about the "controlling for other factors"-idea, which I think people should use.

I completely agree that neglectedness is often the route cause of the size and tractability, but that's the whole point. Neglectedness only matters inasmuch as it affects the other two criteria and is included on it's own mostly to aid analysis of tractability – it has no value on it's own. For instance, if a cause is low in importance/scale and tractability, it wouldn't matter what the neglectedness is at all. I think the neglectedness factor only comes into play if a problem is important and tractable (including on the margin), yet crowded. In that case, even though it would be a high priority for an organization to enter because the only two relevant factors (scale and tractability) are high, if it is a very popular cause, it may become less tractable/important in the near future with more entrants into the space.

I think that the type of importance analysis depends on whether the intervention is scalable or systemic, not whether or not it is new. In systemic action, you are tackling the entire issue, so you want to judge the importance of the issue's entirety. Scalable action works on a per unit basis, so the severity of the issue per person/animal/acre, etc is what matters, as you mentioned regarding GiveDirectly.

Lastly, I think that flow through effects should always be included among cause prioritization criteria, because (cheese warning) what matters at the end of the day, is how much the entire world benefits from an intervention, not just how much it benefits the targeted cause. For instance, research intended to progress one subject often ends up providing unforseen benefits in other areas.