Thanks for this interesting post, and in general for the amount of time and consideration you’ve given to analyzing animal welfare issues here on the Forum. I want to reiterate the points others in this comment section, and urge you to consider much more explicitly the wide range of uncertainty involved in asking a question like this. In particular, the following model choices are in my opinion deserving of a more careful uncertainty treatment in your analysis:
The probability of sentience and welfare capacities of mosquitoes.
This may be substantively much different than that of black soldier flies, whose sentience and welfare capacities we are also deeply uncertain about.
The duration of different types of pain experienced by mosquitoes as they die, conditioned on them having valenced states.
I think we should be much more uncertain about the accuracy of the GPT pain track tool at capturing the true experiences of mosquitoes dying from ITNs. The estimates included in your spreadsheet vary quite a lot.
The number of mosquitoes killed per hour by a net
The weight you should give to excruciating pain relative to longer, less-intense suffering and, to a lesser extent, the weight you give to disabling pain relative to a DALY.
I think it’s an open question, which is quite relevant to this analysis, how pain intensity scales with duration.
Whether the suffering experienced by those who have fatal cases of malaria is accurately accounted for in the analysis.
In particular, pain-track estimates and GBD DALY estimates are different tools for comparing suffering. When I’ve combined/compared them in previous reports, I did so mainly by calibrating the weights for harmful and disabling pain that’s experienced by animals on a more routine basis to the descriptions of different maladies analysed by the GBD. The weight I set on excruciating pain was not high enough to overwhelm the weight given to harmful and disabling pain.
But I think that comparing these two methodologies might break down when you’re giving extremely high weight to short-lived extreme pain since it’s less clear how such pain is incorporated into the DALY estimates. One would need to do a pain-track analysis for the suffering experienced if one has a fatal case of malaria for a true apples-to-apples comparison. I think this would be a fruitful area for more research.
The counterfactual life outcomes and welfare experienced by mosquitoes
Though you mention there is uncertainty in each of these variables, I think that it’s important to consider how they multiplicatively add up when combined and their aggregate effect on the range of plausible results. 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. This, in my view, is especially true if you’re bringing a set of controversial assumptions to bear on a sensitive and morally important topic.
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?
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for this interesting post, and in general for the amount of time and consideration you’ve given to analyzing animal welfare issues here on the Forum. I want to reiterate the points others in this comment section, and urge you to consider much more explicitly the wide range of uncertainty involved in asking a question like this. In particular, the following model choices are in my opinion deserving of a more careful uncertainty treatment in your analysis:
The probability of sentience and welfare capacities of mosquitoes.
This may be substantively much different than that of black soldier flies, whose sentience and welfare capacities we are also deeply uncertain about.
The duration of different types of pain experienced by mosquitoes as they die, conditioned on them having valenced states.
I think we should be much more uncertain about the accuracy of the GPT pain track tool at capturing the true experiences of mosquitoes dying from ITNs. The estimates included in your spreadsheet vary quite a lot.
The number of mosquitoes killed per hour by a net
The weight you should give to excruciating pain relative to longer, less-intense suffering and, to a lesser extent, the weight you give to disabling pain relative to a DALY.
I think it’s an open question, which is quite relevant to this analysis, how pain intensity scales with duration.
Whether the suffering experienced by those who have fatal cases of malaria is accurately accounted for in the analysis.
In particular, pain-track estimates and GBD DALY estimates are different tools for comparing suffering. When I’ve combined/compared them in previous reports, I did so mainly by calibrating the weights for harmful and disabling pain that’s experienced by animals on a more routine basis to the descriptions of different maladies analysed by the GBD. The weight I set on excruciating pain was not high enough to overwhelm the weight given to harmful and disabling pain.
But I think that comparing these two methodologies might break down when you’re giving extremely high weight to short-lived extreme pain since it’s less clear how such pain is incorporated into the DALY estimates. One would need to do a pain-track analysis for the suffering experienced if one has a fatal case of malaria for a true apples-to-apples comparison. I think this would be a fruitful area for more research.
The counterfactual life outcomes and welfare experienced by mosquitoes
Though you mention there is uncertainty in each of these variables, I think that it’s important to consider how they multiplicatively add up when combined and their aggregate effect on the range of plausible results. 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. This, in my view, is especially true if you’re bringing a set of controversial assumptions to bear on a sensitive and morally important topic.
I really appreciate you weighing in here Laura. It’s reassuring to have someone from RP speak into this with some recognition of these issues.
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?