Most problems fall within a 100x tractability range (under certain assumptions)

Abstract

Sometimes I hear discussions like the following:. Amy: I think Cause A is 300x larger in scale than Cause B.Bernard: I agree, but maybe we should put significant resources towards Cause B anyway, because cause A might be 100x less tractable. According to the ITN framework, we should put 1/3x the resources towards cause B as we do towards cause A. Causes can easily be 300x larger in scale than other causes.  But I think Bernard’s claim that Cause B is 100x more tractable is actually very strong. I argue that Bernard must be implicitly claiming that cause B is unusually tractable, that there is a strong departure from logarithmic returns, or that there is no feasible plan of attack for cause A.