It’s hard for me to believe that the effect of bednets is large enough to show an effect in RCTs, but not large enough to show up more often than not as a result of mass distribution of bednets.
You may find it hard to believe, but nevertheless, that is the fact: correlational results can easily be several times the true causal effect, in either direction. If you really want numbers, see, for example, the papers & meta-analyses I’ve compiled in https://www.gwern.net/Correlation on comparing correlations with the causal estimates from simultaneous or later conducted randomized experiments, which have plenty of numbers. Hence, it is easy for a causal effect to be swamped by any time trends or other correlates, and a followup correlation cannot and should not override credible causal results. This is why we need RCTs in the first place. Followups can do useful things like measure whether the implementation is being delivered, or can provide correlational data on things not covered by the original randomized experiments (like unconsidered side effects), but not retry the original case with double jeopardy.
This sort of framing leads to publication bias. We want double jeopardy! This isn’t a criminal trial, where the coercive power of a massive state is being pitted against an individual’s limited ability to defend themselves. This is an intervention people are spending loads of money on, and it’s entirely appropriate to continue checking whether the intervention works as well as we thought.
As I understand the linked page, it’s mostly about retroactive rather than prospective observational studies, and usually for individual rather than population-level interventions. A plan to initiate mass bednet distribution on a national scale is pretty substantially different from that, and doesn’t suffer from the same kind of confounding.
Of course it’s mathematically possible that the data is so noisy relative to the effect size of the supposedly most cost-effective global health intervention out there, that we shouldn’t expect the impact of the intervention to show up. But, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone at GiveWell actually did the relevant calculation to check whether this was the case for bednet distributions.
You may find it hard to believe, but nevertheless, that is the fact: correlational results can easily be several times the true causal effect, in either direction. If you really want numbers, see, for example, the papers & meta-analyses I’ve compiled in https://www.gwern.net/Correlation on comparing correlations with the causal estimates from simultaneous or later conducted randomized experiments, which have plenty of numbers. Hence, it is easy for a causal effect to be swamped by any time trends or other correlates, and a followup correlation cannot and should not override credible causal results. This is why we need RCTs in the first place. Followups can do useful things like measure whether the implementation is being delivered, or can provide correlational data on things not covered by the original randomized experiments (like unconsidered side effects), but not retry the original case with double jeopardy.
This sort of framing leads to publication bias. We want double jeopardy! This isn’t a criminal trial, where the coercive power of a massive state is being pitted against an individual’s limited ability to defend themselves. This is an intervention people are spending loads of money on, and it’s entirely appropriate to continue checking whether the intervention works as well as we thought.
As I understand the linked page, it’s mostly about retroactive rather than prospective observational studies, and usually for individual rather than population-level interventions. A plan to initiate mass bednet distribution on a national scale is pretty substantially different from that, and doesn’t suffer from the same kind of confounding.
Of course it’s mathematically possible that the data is so noisy relative to the effect size of the supposedly most cost-effective global health intervention out there, that we shouldn’t expect the impact of the intervention to show up. But, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone at GiveWell actually did the relevant calculation to check whether this was the case for bednet distributions.