The values I provide are not my personal best guesses for point estimates, but conservative estimates that are sufficient to meaningfully weaken your topline conclusions. In practice, even the assumptions I just listed would be unintuitive to most if used as the bar!
I agree “what fits intuition” is often a bad way of evaluating claims, but this is in context of me saying “I don’t 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.” It seems entirely plausible that a human might take a tradeoff of 100x less duration (3.5 hours * 100 is ~14.5 days), and also value human:mosquito tradeoff at >100x. It wouldn’t be difficult to suggest another OOM in both directions for the same conclusion.
The main thing I’m gesturing at is that for a conclusion as unintuitive as “2 mosquito weeks of excruciating suffering cancels out 1 happy human life”, I think it’s reasonable to consider that there might be other explanations, including e.g. underlying methodological flaws (and in retrospect perhaps inconsistent isn’t the right word, maybe ‘inaccurate’ is better).
For example, by your preferred working definition of excruciating pain, it definitionally can’t exist for more than a few minutes at a time before neurological shutdown. I think this isn’t necessarily unreasonable, but there might be failure modes in your approach when basically all of your BOTECs come down to “which organisms have more aggregate seconds of species-adjusted excruciating pain”.
For example, by your preferred working definition of excruciating pain, it definitionally can’t exist for more than a few minutes at a time before neurological shutdown. I think this isn’t necessarily unreasonable, but there might be failure modes in your approach when basically all of your BOTECs come down to “which organisms have more aggregate seconds of species-adjusted excruciating pain”.
I estimate each mosquito affected by ITNs experiences 1.98 min (= 119/60) of excruciating pain, which is in line with the definition.
The claim isn’t that your answers don’t fit your definitions/methdologies, but that given highly unintuitive conclusions, one should more strongly consider questioning the methodology / definitions you use.
For example, the worst death imaginable for a human is, to a first approximation, capped at a couple of minutes of excruciating pain (or a couple of factors of this), since you value excruciating pain at 10,000 times as bad as the next category, and say that by definition excruciating pain can’t exist for more than a few minutes. But this methodology will be unlikely to accurately capture a lot of extremely bad states of suffering that humans can have. On the other hand, it is much easier to scale even short periods of excruciating suffering with high numbers of animals, especially when you’re happy to consider ~8 million mosquitos killed per human life saved by a bednet—I don’t have empirical evidence to the contrary, but this seems rather high.
This means it requires approximately 100 bednets over the course of 1 year to save 1 life/~50 DALYs.
At your preferred rate of 1 mosquito death per hour per net[1] this comes to approximately 880,000 mosquito deaths per life saved,[2] which is 3 OOMs 1 OOM lower than the ~8 million you would reach if you do the “excruciating pain” calculation, assuming your 763x claim is correct.[3]
(I may not continue engaging on this thread due to capacity constraints, but appreciate the responses!)
Here I make no claims about the reasonableness of 1 mosquito per hour killed by the net as I don’t have any empirical data on this / I’m more uncertain than Nick is but also note that he has more relevant experience than I do here.
Assuming 763x GiveWell is correct, a tradeoff of 14.3 days of mosquito excruciating pain (MEP) for 1 happy human life, 2 minutes of MEP per mosquito, this requires a tradeoff of 7.9 million mosquitos killed for one human life saved.
On the other hand, it is much easier to scale even short periods of excruciating suffering with high numbers of animals, especially when you’re happy to consider ~8 million mosquitos killed per human life saved by a bednet—I don’t have empirical evidence to the contrary, but this seems wildly high.
Great point! It makes sense that harm is proportional to the number of individuals holding the pain caused to each individual constant. So my numbers would only be off if there was a reason to think mosquitoes cannot experience excruciating pain for as much time as humans.
This means it requires approximately 100 bednets over the course of 1 year to save 1 life/~50 DALYs.
“GW calculates a cost per distributed net and life saved of 6.78 $ and 5.10 k$ [in DRC]. These imply AMF has to distribute 752 nets [= 5.10*10^3/6.78] to save a life in DRC”.
At your preferred rate of 1 mosquito death per hour per net[1] this comes to approximately 880,000 mosquito deaths per life saved,[2] which is 3 OOMs lower than the ~8 million you would reach if you do the “excruciating pain” calculation, assuming your 763x claim is correct.[3]
There are 2 issues here:
880 k is 1 order of magniture lower than 8 M, not 3.
I got 7.91 M (= 1*24*365.25*1.20*752) with the 1st approach, which practically matches the 8 M you got with the 2nd approach, multiplying:
1 mosquito killed per net-hour.
24 net-hours per net-day.
365.25 net-days per net-year.
1.20 net-years per net in DRC, as estimated by GW.
752 nets per life saved in DRC, as estimated by GW (see above).
So I think it would be better if you edited the claim below you make at the start of your 1st comment in this thread.
I think you are probably at least a few OOMs off with these figures, even granting most of your assumptions, as this implies (iiuc) ~8 million mosquito deaths per human death averted.
I do not think you uncovered any errors in my calculations.
The values I provide are not my personal best guesses for point estimates, but conservative estimates that are sufficient to meaningfully weaken your topline conclusions. In practice, even the assumptions I just listed would be unintuitive to most if used as the bar!
I agree “what fits intuition” is often a bad way of evaluating claims, but this is in context of me saying “I don’t 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.”
It seems entirely plausible that a human might take a tradeoff of 100x less duration (3.5 hours * 100 is ~14.5 days), and also value human:mosquito tradeoff at >100x. It wouldn’t be difficult to suggest another OOM in both directions for the same conclusion.
The main thing I’m gesturing at is that for a conclusion as unintuitive as “2 mosquito weeks of excruciating suffering cancels out 1 happy human life”, I think it’s reasonable to consider that there might be other explanations, including e.g. underlying methodological flaws (and in retrospect perhaps inconsistent isn’t the right word, maybe ‘inaccurate’ is better).
For example, by your preferred working definition of excruciating pain, it definitionally can’t exist for more than a few minutes at a time before neurological shutdown. I think this isn’t necessarily unreasonable, but there might be failure modes in your approach when basically all of your BOTECs come down to “which organisms have more aggregate seconds of species-adjusted excruciating pain”.
I estimate each mosquito affected by ITNs experiences 1.98 min (= 119/60) of excruciating pain, which is in line with the definition.
The claim isn’t that your answers don’t fit your definitions/methdologies, but that given highly unintuitive conclusions, one should more strongly consider questioning the methodology / definitions you use.
For example, the worst death imaginable for a human is, to a first approximation, capped at a couple of minutes of excruciating pain (or a couple of factors of this), since you value excruciating pain at 10,000 times as bad as the next category, and say that by definition excruciating pain can’t exist for more than a few minutes. But this methodology will be unlikely to accurately capture a lot of extremely bad states of suffering that humans can have. On the other hand, it is much easier to scale even short periods of excruciating suffering with high numbers of animals, especially when you’re happy to consider ~8 million mosquitos killed per human life saved by a bednet—I don’t have empirical evidence to the contrary, but this seems rather high.
Here’s another sense check to illustrate this (please check if I’ve got the maths right here!):
-GiveWell estimate “5.53 deaths averted per 1000 children protected per year” or 0.00553 lives saved per year of protection for a child, or 1 life saved per 180.8 children protected per year.
-They model 1.8 children under each bednet, on average.
This means it requires approximately 100 bednets over the course of 1 year to save 1 life/~50 DALYs.
At your preferred rate of 1 mosquito death per hour per net[1] this comes to approximately 880,000 mosquito deaths per life saved,[2] which is
3 OOMs1 OOM lower than the ~8 million you would reach if you do the “excruciating pain” calculation, assuming your 763x claim is correct.[3](I may not continue engaging on this thread due to capacity constraints, but appreciate the responses!)
Here I make no claims about the reasonableness of 1 mosquito per hour killed by the net as I don’t have any empirical data on this / I’m more uncertain than Nick is but also note that he has more relevant experience than I do here.
180.8/1.8 * 24* 365 = 879,893
Assuming 763x GiveWell is correct, a tradeoff of 14.3 days of mosquito excruciating pain (MEP) for 1 happy human life, 2 minutes of MEP per mosquito, this requires a tradeoff of 7.9 million mosquitos killed for one human life saved.
763*(14.3*24*60)/2 = 7,855,848
Great point! It makes sense that harm is proportional to the number of individuals holding the pain caused to each individual constant. So my numbers would only be off if there was a reason to think mosquitoes cannot experience excruciating pain for as much time as humans.
“GW calculates a cost per distributed net and life saved of 6.78 $ and 5.10 k$ [in DRC]. These imply AMF has to distribute 752 nets [= 5.10*10^3/6.78] to save a life in DRC”.
There are 2 issues here:
880 k is 1 order of magniture lower than 8 M, not 3.
I got 7.91 M (= 1*24*365.25*1.20*752) with the 1st approach, which practically matches the 8 M you got with the 2nd approach, multiplying:
1 mosquito killed per net-hour.
24 net-hours per net-day.
365.25 net-days per net-year.
1.20 net-years per net in DRC, as estimated by GW.
752 nets per life saved in DRC, as estimated by GW (see above).
So I think it would be better if you edited the claim below you make at the start of your 1st comment in this thread.
I do not think you uncovered any errors in my calculations.