The importance, tractability and neglectedness framework, or ITN framework for short, is a framework for estimating the value of allocating marginal resources to solving a problem based on its importance, tractability, and neglectedness.

History

The  ITN framework was first developed by Holden Karnofsky around 2013 as part of his work for GiveWell Labs (which later became Open Philanthropy).^[1]

80,000 Hours later presented its own, quantitative version of the framework.^[2] This version was developed by Owen Cotton-Barratt in late 2014.^[3]

Other differences between Karnofsky's model and Cotton-Barratt's are the terminology ("importance, tractability and uncrowdedness" is replaced by "scale, solvability and neglectedness") and the use of problems rather than causes as the main unit of analysis.

MacAskill, Thomas, and Vallinder (2022) replace neglectedness with leverage, which accounts for the returns to scale of work on a problem at the current margin. If work on a problem now has high leverage, then each unit of future work on will make more progress than a unit of work now. On the other hand, if work on a problem has low leverage, then future work will make less progress.