The data was noisy, so they simply stopped checking whether AMF’s bed net distributions do anything about malaria.
This is an unfair gotcha. What would the point of this be? Of course the data is noisy. Not only is it noisy, it is irrelevant—if it was not, there would never be any need to have run randomized trials in the first place, you would simply dump the bed nets where convenient and check malaria rates. The whole point of randomized trials is realizing that correlational data is extremely weak and cannot give reliable causal inferences. (I can certainly imagine reasons why malaria rates might go up in regions that AMF does bed net distribution in, just as I can imagine reasons why death rates might be greater or increase over time in patients prescribed new drug X as compared to patients not prescribed X...) If they did the followups and malaria rates held stable or increased, you would not then believe that the bednets do not work; if it takes randomized trials to justify spending on bednets, it cannot then take only surveys to justify not spending on bed nets, as the causal question is identical. Since it does not affect any decisions, it is not important to measure. Or, if it did, what you ought to be criticizing Givewell & AMF for, as well as everyone else, is ever advocating & spending resources on highly unethical randomized trials, rather than criticizing them for not doing some followup surveys.
(A reasonable critique might be that they are not examining whether the intervention—which has been identified as causally effective and passing a cost-benefit—is being correctly delivered, the right people getting the nets, and using the nets. But as far as I know, they do track that...)
Saying ‘very little progress’ seems to considerably understate it; many cancers are now treatable which were untreatable, and even former death sentences can be cured. As well, much of that research was spent in the past on expensive but obsolete methods or on building knowledge bases and tools which are now available for anti-aging research. (While Apollo may have cost $26b to put a man on the moon in 1969, it should not then cost another $26b in 2017 to put another man on the moon.)
Comparing with cancer is interesting in part because they’re so different. Cancer is a hostile self-reproducing ecosystem which literally evolves as it is treated; aging and senescent cells, however, appear to be none of those. For example, it appears to be a lot easier to trick a senescent cell30246-5 “‘Targeted Apoptosis of Senescent Cells Restores Tissue Homeostasis in Response to Chemotoxicity and Aging’, Baar et al 2017”) into committing suicide than a cancer cell.
Do you really need progress on all 7? Mortality with age follows a Gompertz distribution which has an exponential term increasing mortality risk and a baseline hazard/risk; interventions on the aging process itself, as opposed to tinkering with improved fixes for symptoms like cancer, would seem like they would affect the exponential term and not the hazard term. Since the Gompertz mortality curve is dominated by the exponential term, not the baseline hazard ratio, even small reductions in the aging rate lead to large changes in life expectancy. (In contrast, large reductions in the hazard ratio, like halving, only add a few years.)