The Tree of Priorities: A (Cause) Prioritization Framework

Imagine a couple that tries to make a decision about how to set the table at their wedding. They spend all their time trying to work out this difficult decision, making lists and drawings, and asking Google and friends for advice. Yet underneath their efforts pertaining to the wedding table, a deeper doubt is lingering in their minds: whether they really want to marry each other in the first place. Unfortunately, they have not spent sufficient time contemplating this more fundamental question, and yet what occupies their attention is still the wedding table.

This is clearly unreasonable. Whether it makes sense to spend time on setting the wedding table depends on whether the wedding is sensible in the first place, and therefore the latter is clearly the most important question to contemplate and answer first. Two weeks after the wedding, a divorce is filed. It was all a waste, one that deeper reflection could have prevented.

This example may seem a little weird, yet I think it captures what most of us do most of the time to a striking extent. We all spend significant amounts of energy planning and executing ill-considered “weddings”. Rather than considering the most important and fundamental questions, we get caught up in ill-considered specific tasks that happen to feel important or interesting.

This is hardly a great mystery when considered from an evolutionary perspective: doing whatever felt most interesting at any given time probably made a lot of sense in our ancestral environment, and no doubt still does much of the time — ignoring every moderately interesting thing that jumps into consciousness is not a recipe for success in today’s world either. The key, of course, is balance. Yet I believe we are out of balance for the most part, unfortunately. It is too rare for us to be guided by considerations about which objectives are most reasonable to pursue, and we too rarely see the importance of thinking hierarchically about our priorities.

For that is arguably the point the example above illustrates: we should contemplate the fundamental questions and decisions before we move on to the more specific ones, since the answers to the fundamental questions largely determine which specific tasks are worth pursuing. In short, the specifics are contingent on the fundamentals. And this has significant implications: we need to pay much more attention to the fundamentals.

This is what the “tree of priorities” illustrated below is all about. It is a framework for making decisions that emphasizes first things first, while highlighting that “first things first” is best thought of in hierarchical terms.

At the bottom of this tree we have our fundamental values upon which everything else rests and depends — the root and stem of the tree, one could say. From this, something slightly more specific follows, namely the causes that are worth pursuing given our values — the branches of the tree. Finally, on these branches, we find something more specific still, namely interventions that enable us to attain success in the respective cause areas — the leaves of the tree, if you will.

An illustration of this tree might look like this (there can obviously be any number of causes):

So, at the most general level, this “tree of priorities” asks us to consider three questions, in the following order:

    1) What are our fundamental values? (In other words: what matters?)

    2) Which causes should we pursue given our fundamental values?

    3) Which interventions should we pursue within our specific causes?

I think this is a valuable set of questions, not least due to their ordering: it is clear that our answers to question 3) depend on our answers to question 2), which in turn depend on our answers to question 1).

Hence, the tree of priorities suggests an idea that does not seem shared by many, namely that contemplating fundamental values should be our first priority. I think this is largely correct, at least if we do not have a thoroughly considered answer in place already.

Our fundamental values can be thought of as the point of departure that determines our forward direction, and if we take off in just a slightly sub-optimal direction and keep on moving, we might well end up far away from where we should ideally have gone. In other words, being a little wrong about the fundamentals can result in being extremely wrong at the level of the specifics, and hence it is worth spending considerable resources on clarifying and refining the fundamentals.

Cause Prioritization

“Cause prioritization is the most effective use of altruistic resources.”

— Paul Christiano

People who want to improve the world are, like everybody else, extremely biased. A prime example is that we tend to work on whatever cause we have stumbled upon so far and to suppose, without deeper examination, that this cause is the most important one. This cannot be safely assumed, however.

Here’s what a typical path of “cause updating” might look like: We find out that thousands of people die every single day due to extreme poverty, and find that to be the most important cause to work on. Then we realize that humanity torments and kills billions of non-human beings every year, and that discrimination against these beings cannot be justified, which might then prompt us to focus on ending this moral catastrophe. Then we are told about the suffering of wild animals, its enormous scope, and why we ignore it, and then we might (also) work on that. Then we are convinced by arguments about the enormous importance of the far future, and then that becomes our main focus. And so on.

To be sure, such an evolutionary progression is helpful and even laudable. The question is just whether we can optimize it. Might we be able to undertake this process of updating in a more direct and systematic fashion? After all, having undergone a continual process of updating that has made us realize that we were wrong about, and perhaps even completely unaware of, the most pressing causes in the past, it seems reasonable to assume that we are likely still wrong in significant ways today. We should be open to the possibility that the cause we are currently working on is not be the most pressing one.

Cause prioritization is the direct and systematic attempt to become better informed about which causes are worth prioritizing the most. The importance of such a deliberate effort should be apparent: working on the causes through which we can have the best impact is obviously of great importance — it means that we can potentially help many more sentient beings — and in order to identify those causes, deliberate exploration seems significantly more efficient than expecting to stumble upon them by chance. Rather than optimizing specific tasks that further a given cause, cause prioritization goes a step meta and asks: given our values, what causes are most important to focus on in the first place?

I hope to explore this question in future essays. I wish to provide a rough framework for how we can think about cause prioritization, and based on this, I will try to point to important causes and questions that I think we should focus on and explore further.