I donât want this to be the kind of discussion which is front and center on our public EA forum for external facing reasons and PR risk. This might well be the wrong response and many people might disagree with me on this which is fair enough.
If AMF and the nets werenât doing their job, I would guess the alternatives might be at least as bad for mosquito welfare.
I do not think this is the relevant counterfactual. I assume ITNs (or malaria chemoprevention, or vaccines) save human lives more cost-effectively than the alternatives you mentioned. Otherwise, I would expect GiveWell to recommend them. So, to the extent people want to save lives as cost-effectively as possible, they will use the available resources to fight malaria to distribute ITNs. As a result, I think less donations to AMF simply result in less ITNs around.
As many have mentioned, @Vasco Grilođ¸âs blunt tool of estimating âexcruciating painâ seems almost absurd. The idea that a mosquito experiences that degree of suffering as it dies of poison is possible but so unlikely that I think that best guesses for that number should be revised down by orders of magnitude. See other comments for in-depth arguments, I appreciated this comment from @bruce
âI donât know where exactly to draw the line here, but 14.3 mosquito days of excruciating suffering for one happy human life seems clearly beyond it.â
I estimate 14.3 mosquito-days (= 51*365.25/â0.013*10^-5) of excruciating pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving a life under GWâs moral weights multiplying:
51 DALYs averted per life saved under GWâs moral weights.
365.25 days per year.
The ratio between the intensity of fully healthy human and mosquito life, which I set to the reciprocal of RPâs median welfare range of black soldier flies of 0.013.
The ratio between the intensity of fully healthy life and excruciating pain of 10^-5 (= 0.1/â(10*10^3)). This implies 1 day of fully healthy life is neutralised by 0.864 s (= 24*60^2*10^-5) of âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ.
Do the 3rd and 4th inputs seem âalmost absurdâ?
Thereâs just no way mosquito nets kill anything like 24 mosquitos a day on average. I would guess this at under 5. Basing this estimate on Vasco getting a lot of bites while sitting outdoors at night (Mosquito nets are indoors) doesnât make much sense.
I was seeing much more than 1 mosquito per hour during dust outdoors in Moshi (Tanzania). People most affected by malaria may sleep indoors, but have houses with very limited ability to prevent mosquitoes from entering. The roofs can be made of turf too, which would attract mosquitoes.
I did not easily find empirical estimates for the number of mosquitoes killed by ITNs. I would be happy to update the number if you find them, although my takeaways would be the same even if ITNs only killed e.g. 10 % as many mosquitoes as I assumed.
Anchoring on RPâs moral weights which I argue might be too animal friendly will often mean that any human helping intervention which hurts animals at all might look âbadâ. Especially in the case of smaller animals which are extremely different from humans, their use of binary behavioural proxies is almost guaranteed to give high moral weights.
As Bob Fischer said, âI donât think youâve said anything that should cause someone to question that headline resultâ, âthe ultimate question is whether our [RPâs] decisions were wrong, not whether they can be construed as animal-friendlyâ.
I think this first example isnât comparable, and a bit of a strawman. The Vox article is about how bad factory farming is, and how we donât need to do that to help humans to flourish. This discussion is about potentially withdrawing life-saving interventions because they might be detrimental to animals. This directly connects the saving lives to harming animals â the Vox article doesnât.
I think youâre basically right abobut the ITN counterfactual that if marginal funding goes away from ITNs then it might not go to alternatives. Less donations to AMF might simply result in less ITNS. If this argument though was taken up on a larger scale and AMF reduced net distribution, many people would want to save lives from and kill mosquito malaria regardless. The public health world isnât likely tolerate malaria rapidly worsening because EAs decided Nets were bad for mosquitos. I think you are mainly right on this point though.
On your imputs, its the 4th that seems most important to me but Iâll comment on the 3rd too.
I donât think the 3rd input is absurd, but I do think it is probably too animal friendly. Like I said in my critique, their moral range calculation basically ends up as probability of sentience x behaviour score, and because all animals exhibit some of the behaviours they measure I think especially for smaller animals this is likely to overestimate their welfare. RPs behaviour score only really allows for a narrow range of something like between like 20 and 100 so its almost impossible for any small animal to come out of RPâs moral weights caculation with a negligibly small moral weight. In the article I was trying to be very measured and not make huge calls, but if youâre asking me what I might have done differently to weight animal behaviours, then Iâd say I would have allowed for a much bigger behaviour score range, perhaps through having more than a binary yes/âno system on some of the behaviours â giving less complex pain response behaviors a fraction of more complex ones.
I think the 4th input seems absurd and I wonât rehash this much as many others have made arguments against your reasoning on this thread. Youâre translating a figure which is on the upper bound of judging severe human pain (which like Bruce said, by definition canât last long) directly onto what you think might be happening in mosquitos â a wildly different organism. On what grounds really would mosquitos dying of poisoning likely cause that severe pain at a best guess? I think its possible but very unlikely so I think it would be reasonable for the sake of conservatism to reduce this number by orders of magnitude.
4. On the number of mosquitos front for a start I donât like comments like âmy takeways would probably be the same even ifâŚ.â Multipliers can add up, and weâre trying to move towards accuracy so I think it can be an unhelpful copout to question how much any element of an analysis matters â Rethink Priorities said things like this a number of times during their moral weights project which was a small red flag for me.
I agree thereâs no empirical research on the mosquito number front, but from my perspective having travelled around Africa and living in a grass thatched hut and sleeping under a mosquito net for the last 10 years, 24 mosquitos killed a day on average per net seems extremely unlikely. That would be something like 240 million mosquitos killed by nets alone every day in Uganda â which seems to me perhaps plausible but unlikely. From a distance I think you could have been more conservative with your âbest guessâ
Iâve already discussed the RP thing above thanks!
I think this first example isnât comparable, and a bit of a strawman. The Vox article is about how bad factory farming is, and how we donât need to do that to help humans to flourish. This discussion is about potentially withdrawing life-saving interventions because they might be detrimental to animals. This directly connects the saving lives to harming animals â the Vox article doesnât.
I understand they are not directly comparable, but I guess the newsletters from Vox also reach a much wider audience who is less acceptable of controversial takes compared to readers of the EA Forum.
Iâd say I would have allowed for a much bigger behaviour score range
Do you mean you would account for other behavioural proxies for welfare capacity besides the 90 RP considered? Which ones? RP seemed to be super comprehensive.
perhaps through having more than a binary yes/âno system on some of the behaviours
The program runs 10,000 simulations where the presence or absence of each proxy in the âSimple_Scoringâ spreadsheet was a random variable. For a given organism, the steps taken in a single simulation to generate the proxies possessed by that organism were:
Start with a dictionary containing each proxy and an empty list to add scores to.
For each proxy in the Simple Scoring sheet:
First, randomly select the probability that the organism possesses the proxy from a uniform distribution whose range maps onto the judgment determined by our contractors. The probability map is as follows:
No: [0.00, 0.00] (Used for the âmotileâ proxy)
Likely no: [0, 0.25)
Lean no: [0.25, 0.5)
Lean yes: [0.5, 0.75)
Likely yes: [0.75, 1.0]
Yes: [1.00, 1.00] (Used for the âmotileâ proxy)
For example, if pigs scored a âLikely yesâ on taste aversion behavior, then the probability that pigs exhibit taste aversion behavior is sampled uniformly over the interval [0.75, 1.0]. If a proxy was judged âUnknownâ, then we defaulted to giving a zero probability of it being present; however, this default can be changed at the start of running the program.
Second, generate a Bernoulli random variable using this probability of the species possessing the trait, where 1 indicates that the trait is present and 0 indicates that it is absent.
Add the score (0 or 1) to the list corresponding to its particular proxy in the dictionary.
For a given organism, this process was repeated for 10,000 simulations, where each proxyâs score in a given simulation was appended to its respective list. Then, we repeated this procedure for all eighteen organism types studied and saved the simulated proxy data.
RP did not use a binary system to determine the welfare range conditional on sentience, and actually underestimated this by giving zero weight to proxies for which there was no information (see what I bolded below).
To generate the distributions of welfare ranges across species and models, the user must answer the same three questions about whether to give non-zero probability to âUnknown,â âLean no,â and âLikely noâ judgments and what weight should be given to proxies weâre highly confident matter for welfare ranges as were asked for the probabilities of sentience. As before, users can change the probabilities given to âUnknownsâ for one or more species of their choosing.
In our final simulations:
We chose not to assign any weight to proxies with âunknownâ judgments for any species. This likely leads to underestimating the welfare ranges for several animal types.
We chose to assign positive probabilities to proxies whose judgments are âlikely noâ and âlean no.â
We weighted the proxies that we are highly confident matter for welfare ranges as being five times as important as all other proxies.
giving less complex pain response behaviors a fraction of more complex ones
I do not understand what you are referring to. Which specific proxies do you think should be weighted more heavily?
I think the 4th input seems absurd and I wonât rehash this much as many others have made arguments against your reasoning on this thread. Youâre translating a figure which is on the upper bound of judging severe human pain (which like Bruce said, by definition canât last long) directly onto what you think might be happening in mosquitos â a wildly different organism.
For all the analyses relying on pain intensities I am aware of, from AIM and RP, the ratio between the intensity of a pain of a given category and that of another is the same across species. I have now asked Cynthia Schuck-Paim, who is the research director of WFP (the organisation defining the pain intensities).
I agree excruciating pain âcanât last longâ, but this is consistent with my estimate that ITNs cause 119 s of excruciating pain per mosquito they kill.
On what grounds really would mosquitos dying of poisoning likely cause that severe pain at a best guess? I think its possible but very unlikely so I think it would be reasonable for the sake of conservatism to reduce this number by orders of magnitude.
As I say in the post, my estimates for the time in pain come from aggregating 3 sets of estimates provided by WFPâs GPT Pain-Track. My estimate of 119 s of excruciating pain may well not be accurate, but which evidence do you have for it being âpossible but very unlikelyâ to be that long?
4. On the number of mosquitos front for a start I donât like comments like âmy takeways would probably be the same even ifâŚ.â Multipliers can add up, and weâre trying to move towards accuracy so I think it can be an unhelpful copout to question how much any element of an analysis matters â Rethink Priorities said things like this a number of times during their moral weights project which was a small red flag for me.
I agree. At the same time, I think it is worth having in mind how far one is from reversing the conclusions.
I agree thereâs no empirical research on the mosquito number front, but from my perspective having travelled around Africa and living in a grass thatched hut and sleeping under a mosquito net for the last 10 years, 24 mosquitos killed a day on average per net seems extremely unlikely. That would be something like 240 million mosquitos killed by nets alone every day in Uganda â which seems to me perhaps plausible but unlikely. From a distance I think you could have been more conservative with your âbest guessâ
I estimate GWâs last grant to AMF will kill 0.0183 % as many mosquitoes as the ones currently alive globally over the lifetime of the bednets it funds. This would correspond to killing 1.19 % (= 1.83*10^-4*195/â3) of the mosquitoes in DRC per year assuming mosquitoes were uniformly distributed across the existing 195 countries, and that the nets funded by the grant are distributed over 3 years. In reality, it would be less because DRC should have more mosquitoes than a random country. AMF being responsible for killing less than 1.19 % of the mosquitoes in DRC does not sound implausible.
For all the analyses relying on pain intensities I am aware of, from AIM and RP, the ratio between the intensity of a pain of a given category and that of another is the same across species. I have now asked Cynthia Schuck-Paim, who is the research director of WFP (the organisation defining the pain intensities).
Cynthia has just clarified the answer to both of the following questions can be âyesâ.
If I understand correctly, even if it was known with certainty that:
1 h of disabling pain in humans was 10 times as bad as 1 h of hurtful pain in humans, 1 h of disabling pain in shrimps could be more/âless than 10 times as bas as 1 h of hurtful pain in shrimps? I think you are implying it could indeed be more/âless than 10 times as bad.
1 h of disabling pain in humans was 10 times as bad as 1 h of hurtful pain in humans, 10 h of disabling pain in humans could be more/âless than 10 times as bad as 10 h of hurtful pain in humans? I think you are implying it could indeed be more/âless than 10 times as bad.
I think my assumption of constant ratios within and across species still makes sense as the most agnostic assumption.
Thanks, Nick.
Bryan Walsh published a newsletter for Vox, Human progress has come at the expense of animals. It doesnât have to., where there is a discussion of the EA Forum post Net global welfare may be negative and declining by Kyle Fish. In addition, âA version of this [Bryanâs] newsletter originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletterâ.
I do not think this is the relevant counterfactual. I assume ITNs (or malaria chemoprevention, or vaccines) save human lives more cost-effectively than the alternatives you mentioned. Otherwise, I would expect GiveWell to recommend them. So, to the extent people want to save lives as cost-effectively as possible, they will use the available resources to fight malaria to distribute ITNs. As a result, I think less donations to AMF simply result in less ITNs around.
I estimate 14.3 mosquito-days (= 51*365.25/â0.013*10^-5) of excruciating pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving a life under GWâs moral weights multiplying:
51 DALYs averted per life saved under GWâs moral weights.
365.25 days per year.
The ratio between the intensity of fully healthy human and mosquito life, which I set to the reciprocal of RPâs median welfare range of black soldier flies of 0.013.
The ratio between the intensity of fully healthy life and excruciating pain of 10^-5 (= 0.1/â(10*10^3)). This implies 1 day of fully healthy life is neutralised by 0.864 s (= 24*60^2*10^-5) of âscalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]â, or âdismemberment, or extreme tortureâ.
Do the 3rd and 4th inputs seem âalmost absurdâ?
I was seeing much more than 1 mosquito per hour during dust outdoors in Moshi (Tanzania). People most affected by malaria may sleep indoors, but have houses with very limited ability to prevent mosquitoes from entering. The roofs can be made of turf too, which would attract mosquitoes.
I did not easily find empirical estimates for the number of mosquitoes killed by ITNs. I would be happy to update the number if you find them, although my takeaways would be the same even if ITNs only killed e.g. 10 % as many mosquitoes as I assumed.
As Bob Fischer said, âI donât think youâve said anything that should cause someone to question that headline resultâ, âthe ultimate question is whether our [RPâs] decisions were wrong, not whether they can be construed as animal-friendlyâ.
I think this first example isnât comparable, and a bit of a strawman. The Vox article is about how bad factory farming is, and how we donât need to do that to help humans to flourish. This discussion is about potentially withdrawing life-saving interventions because they might be detrimental to animals. This directly connects the saving lives to harming animals â the Vox article doesnât.
I think youâre basically right abobut the ITN counterfactual that if marginal funding goes away from ITNs then it might not go to alternatives. Less donations to AMF might simply result in less ITNS. If this argument though was taken up on a larger scale and AMF reduced net distribution, many people would want to save lives from and kill mosquito malaria regardless. The public health world isnât likely tolerate malaria rapidly worsening because EAs decided Nets were bad for mosquitos. I think you are mainly right on this point though.
On your imputs, its the 4th that seems most important to me but Iâll comment on the 3rd too.
I donât think the 3rd input is absurd, but I do think it is probably too animal friendly. Like I said in my critique, their moral range calculation basically ends up as probability of sentience x behaviour score, and because all animals exhibit some of the behaviours they measure I think especially for smaller animals this is likely to overestimate their welfare. RPs behaviour score only really allows for a narrow range of something like between like 20 and 100 so its almost impossible for any small animal to come out of RPâs moral weights caculation with a negligibly small moral weight. In the article I was trying to be very measured and not make huge calls, but if youâre asking me what I might have done differently to weight animal behaviours, then Iâd say I would have allowed for a much bigger behaviour score range, perhaps through having more than a binary yes/âno system on some of the behaviours â giving less complex pain response behaviors a fraction of more complex ones.
I think the 4th input seems absurd and I wonât rehash this much as many others have made arguments against your reasoning on this thread. Youâre translating a figure which is on the upper bound of judging severe human pain (which like Bruce said, by definition canât last long) directly onto what you think might be happening in mosquitos â a wildly different organism. On what grounds really would mosquitos dying of poisoning likely cause that severe pain at a best guess? I think its possible but very unlikely so I think it would be reasonable for the sake of conservatism to reduce this number by orders of magnitude.
4. On the number of mosquitos front for a start I donât like comments like âmy takeways would probably be the same even ifâŚ.â Multipliers can add up, and weâre trying to move towards accuracy so I think it can be an unhelpful copout to question how much any element of an analysis matters â Rethink Priorities said things like this a number of times during their moral weights project which was a small red flag for me.
I agree thereâs no empirical research on the mosquito number front, but from my perspective having travelled around Africa and living in a grass thatched hut and sleeping under a mosquito net for the last 10 years, 24 mosquitos killed a day on average per net seems extremely unlikely. That would be something like 240 million mosquitos killed by nets alone every day in Uganda â which seems to me perhaps plausible but unlikely. From a distance I think you could have been more conservative with your âbest guessâ
Iâve already discussed the RP thing above thanks!
I understand they are not directly comparable, but I guess the newsletters from Vox also reach a much wider audience who is less acceptable of controversial takes compared to readers of the EA Forum.
Do you mean you would account for other behavioural proxies for welfare capacity besides the 90 RP considered? Which ones? RP seemed to be super comprehensive.
I do not understand. RP did not have a binary system to determine the probability of sentience.
RP did not use a binary system to determine the welfare range conditional on sentience, and actually underestimated this by giving zero weight to proxies for which there was no information (see what I bolded below).
I do not understand what you are referring to. Which specific proxies do you think should be weighted more heavily?
For all the analyses relying on pain intensities I am aware of, from AIM and RP, the ratio between the intensity of a pain of a given category and that of another is the same across species. I have now asked Cynthia Schuck-Paim, who is the research director of WFP (the organisation defining the pain intensities).
I agree excruciating pain âcanât last longâ, but this is consistent with my estimate that ITNs cause 119 s of excruciating pain per mosquito they kill.
As I say in the post, my estimates for the time in pain come from aggregating 3 sets of estimates provided by WFPâs GPT Pain-Track. My estimate of 119 s of excruciating pain may well not be accurate, but which evidence do you have for it being âpossible but very unlikelyâ to be that long?
I agree. At the same time, I think it is worth having in mind how far one is from reversing the conclusions.
As I replied to Bruce:
Cynthia has just clarified the answer to both of the following questions can be âyesâ.
I think my assumption of constant ratios within and across species still makes sense as the most agnostic assumption.