Otherwise, there’s a good risk of arriving at a directionally incorrect conclusion that can have big consequences if we act too quickly on it.
It is unclear to me whether the uncertainties you highlighted push the harm to mosquitoes as a fraction of the benefits to humans up or down. However, I very much agree there is a good risk I under or overestimated it. I did not mean to suggest AMF is harmful, as naively implied by my main estimate. As I say in the post, “it is unclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfare”. If forced to guess, I would say AMF is beneficial, but I am practically indifferent between donating to AMF and burning money. I do not see how this conclusion would qualitatively change if I had modelled the uncertainty of my inputs more explicitly with a Monte Carlo simulation. I think uncertainty in the welfare range of mosquitoes alone is enough to reach that conclusion, and probabilistic modelling would not resolve it.
I neglected the effectsof ITNs on the number of wild animals because it is super unclear whether they have positive or negative lives. Yet, there is still lots of uncertainty even just in the effects I considered. RP’s 5th and 95th percentile welfare ranges of black soldier flies are 0 and 15.1 (= 0.196/0.013) times their median. This suggests that, even ignoring effects on the number of wild animals, and just accounting for uncertainty in mosquitoes’ capacity for welfare, the 5th and 95th percentile harm to mosquitoes caused by ITNs are 0 and 11.5 k (= 15.1*763) times their benefits to humans. So it is unclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfare.
More importantly, I think the large uncertainty should update one towards learning more, and supporting more robustly beneficial interventions. In particular, donating less to organisations like AMF, whose cost-effectiveness may well be majorly driven by unclear effects on animals, and more to ones like Arthropoda Foundation, SWP, and WAI. Do you agree?
Thanks, Laura.
It is unclear to me whether the uncertainties you highlighted push the harm to mosquitoes as a fraction of the benefits to humans up or down. However, I very much agree there is a good risk I under or overestimated it. I did not mean to suggest AMF is harmful, as naively implied by my main estimate. As I say in the post, “it is unclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfare”. If forced to guess, I would say AMF is beneficial, but I am practically indifferent between donating to AMF and burning money. I do not see how this conclusion would qualitatively change if I had modelled the uncertainty of my inputs more explicitly with a Monte Carlo simulation. I think uncertainty in the welfare range of mosquitoes alone is enough to reach that conclusion, and probabilistic modelling would not resolve it.
More importantly, I think the large uncertainty should update one towards learning more, and supporting more robustly beneficial interventions. In particular, donating less to organisations like AMF, whose cost-effectiveness may well be majorly driven by unclear effects on animals, and more to ones like Arthropoda Foundation, SWP, and WAI. Do you agree?