I ended up strong downvoting your comment because I don't want concerns about PR risk to be top comment on this post.

I trust EA as a high quality source of information on charity, mainly because EA presents itself as impartial to causes, objective, and acts with honesty and integrity. This post seemed well researched and made in good faith to me, and your willingness to censor it for making the movement look bad makes me trust the quality of information on this forum seriously.

If you believe something is false, just criticize it for being false.

If you don't like it, just say you don't like it.

Your personal favor towards malaria nets, and your personal distaste for this post is totally okay. I just don't think PR considerations should be primarily what EA forum is about.
It is also counterproductive. To put it rudely, you are not cool enough to care about PR. You are not ready to critique aesthetics, vibes, and taste-making; not without making things worse. The forum is not a good canvas. It is not designed to be. It should not try to be. 

Please continue to do lots of research, math, and compassion. If you must care about appearance, please go about it in a positive, truth-seeking way - clarity in writing, true and rousing depictions of suffering, that kind of thing.

Thanks, Nick.

I don't 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.

Bryan Walsh published a newsletter for Vox, Human progress has come at the expense of animals. It doesn’t 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, "A version of this [Bryan's] newsletter originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter".

If AMF and the nets weren't 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 Grilo🔸's blunt tool of estimating "excruciating pain" 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 
  
  "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."

I estimate 14.3 mosquito-days (= 51*365.25/0.013*10^-5) of excruciating pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving a life under GW's moral weights multiplying:

• 51 DALYs averted per life saved under GW's 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 RP’s 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/(10*10^3)). This implies 1 day of fully healthy life is neutralised by 0.864 s (= 24*60^2*10^-5) of "scalding and severe burning events [in large parts of the body]", or "dismemberment, or extreme torture".

Do the 3rd and 4th inputs seem "almost absurd"?

• There's 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) doesn't 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 RP's 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 "bad". 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, "I don’t think you’ve said anything that should cause someone to question that headline result", "the ultimate question is whether our [RP's] decisions were wrong, not whether they can be construed as animal-friendly".

Thanks, David.

If I'm understanding your calculations correctly, the underlying assumption is that the pain you estimate a mosquito to experience for two minutes has the same weight as an entire afternoon of incomparably blissful human existence even taking into account the cognitive differences between a human and a mosquito?

Which 2 min of pain in mosquitoes are you referring to? "I infer that 392 mosquito-years of disabling pain neutralise the additional human welfare from saving 1 life under GW’s moral weights".

In all seriousness, if you do attach such high weights to the possible suffering of individual insects, I highly recommend nontoxic spider repellent, especially around your light fittings as an extremely cost effective intervention.

I do not kill mosquitoes or other insects inside my house, but I guess quickly crushing insects causes them much less pain than ITNs. "I estimate mosquitoes’ welfare loss per mosquito killed by nets is equivalent to 19.9 k mosquito-minutes of disabling pain".

I kill insects by driving, but I think this is fine. Firstly, the deaths are hopefully pretty quick. Secondly, driving saves me time, and I believe most of my impact comes from my work and donations, not from my direct impact on animals via my diet or driving. I calculate neutralising the harms caused to poultry birds and farmed aquatic animals per person in 2022 only requires donating 0.0214 $ to SWP. I guess my potentially negative direct impact on wild animals can also be neutralised with very little donations.

Some of your more quantifiable estimates also seem selected to be particularly unfavourable to humans. For example, the robustly established fact that humans experience days of pain from malaria infections, (including the vast majority of malaria infections which are nonfatal) is disregarded. Medical literature evaluating anti-malaria interventions often focuses on mortality rather than morbidity too, but it's not weighing up human DALYs against a few minutes of mosquito morbidity!

I used GW's estimate of 5.10 k$ per life saved by AMF in DRC, which is supposed to account for effects on mortality, morbidity, and income. GW's estimate may well not be perfect, but I think the uncertainty is the cost to save a life is negligible in comparison with that of other parameters like the welfare range of mosquitoes.

Likewise, the assumption that a typical ITN is killing an average of 24 mosquitos per day seems to depend on an inflated number mosquitos per dwelling, even before the mild repellent effect and low killing efficiency of fleeting contact with the nets is considered.

I wish I had a better estimate, but I did not easily find one. My assumption was somewhat informed by a trip I did to Moshi (Tanzania) in early 2020. There were certainly more than 1 mosquito bitting me per hour during dust, and I was using repellent if I recall correctly. 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 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.

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 effects of 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?

Thanks for the comment, bruce.

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 very much disagree. I explain why below.

I'm assuming you mean "23.9 mosquito seconds of excruciating pain" and "11.0 mosquito minutes of excruciating pain" trading off against 1 human day of a practically maximlly happy life (please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you!)

You are misunderstanding me. I mean that, if excruciating pain was 3.62 % (= 0.00131^(1/2)) as intense as I assumed, I would guess 23.9 s of excruciating pain in a given species (humans, of mosquitoes, or other) would neutralise 1 day of a practically maximally happy life in that same species.

Using your stated figures of $41 million and $5100 per life for the GW grant, this implies you think the grant will lead to somewhere between 1.3 trillion and 37 trillion mosquito deaths in DRC alone.^[3]

For context, this source estimates global mosquito population as between 110 trillion and 'in the quadrillions'.

I estimate GW's 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*195/3) 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.

Thanks, Angelina.

I feel a bit wary of using SWP as your default example here because this comment from @Aaron Boddy🔸 makes me think that SWP doesn't have a ton of room for rapidly deploying more funding right now

Aaron said SWP's room for more funding in 2025 was "Something in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars". I guess my post will influence much less than this, but I would also be happy with supporting SWP in subsequent years. SWP's marginal cost-effectiveness would ideally be the same across time. If that was not the case, SWP should move funds from the worst to the best years until the marginal cost-effectiveness is the same across years. I think this is hard to achieve over long time horizons, but I assume their marginal cost-effectivenes is 2025 will not be too different from that in 2026.

I also see Arthropoda Foundation and WAI as great donation options.

A broader point: I'd expect the marginal ROI of additional funding in the invertebrate welfare space to diminish much faster than the marginal ROI of AMF donations.

I tend to agree, because there is much more funding going towards AMF. On the other hand, donating to organisations doing research on invertebrate welfare like Arthropoda and WAI can open up more funding opportunities in the space. In any case, donating to invertebrate welfare seems way more cost-effective as of now. I do not even know whether donating to AMF is beneficial or harmful.

Hi Matthew,

I think it is super unclear whether wild animals (which are overwhelmingly r-strategists) have positive or negative lives. So I implicitly assumed mosquitoes not affected by ITNs have neutral lives, such that the welfare loss caused by ITNs corresponds to a net welfare loss. I agree ITNs may be beneficial if mosquitoes not affected by ITNs have negative lives, but they may also be more harmful if they have positive lives. There is also large uncertainty about how decreasing the number of mosquitoes impacts the welfare of other wild animals. So I conclude "it is unclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfare".

I recommend pursuing actions which are robustly beneficial under uncertainty instead of acting as if our best guesses are correct. In particular:

I believe the large uncertainty about the effects of human welfare interventions on wild (and farmed) animals should push one towards prioritising:

• Animal welfare interventions improving the conditions of animals instead of decreasing the number of animals with negative lives, or increasing the number of animals with positive lives. I recommend donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP), which I estimate has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as GW’s top charities (neglecting their effects on animals).
• Learning more about helping invertebrates, whose total capacity for welfare vastly exceeds that of vertebrates. I recommend donating to (I ordered the organisations alphabetically):
  • The Arthropoda Foundation. Their research priorities are humane slaughter protocols, stocking densities and substrate research, and automated welfare assessment.
  • The Wild Animal Initiative (WAI). For instance:
    • They intend “to use current and new funding” for, among other activities, “Conducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions — first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill them”.
    • I estimate paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects is 23.7 k times as cost-effective as GW’s top charities.

Thanks for the comment too, Nithin.

I've wondered this and would be interested in seeing something similar for screwworms as well, if you ever get around to estimating that.

I did some quick calculations about this which suggest it is unclear whether eradicating screwworms is beneficial or harmful. If they have positive lives, I think the decrease in welfare caused by them not existing may well outweight the increase in welfare of the animals which would no longer be infected by them.

I'm also curious to know why you chose the same median welfare range as black soldier flies. Is this just the best guess you had, or is there a reason that mosquitoes would have similar experiences to them?

Thanks, @Nithin Ravi^[1]. I have added the following to the post.

Mosquitoes belong to the order Diptera, and black soldier flies are the only species analysed by RP of that order.

I tried to get a better estimate, but without success.

I asked Bob Fischer, who led RP’s moral weight project, about a best guess for the median welfare range of mosquitoes that RP would have obtained if they had analysed them. I privately disclaimed I would publish this post without Bob’s guess, but Bob did not share one.

1. ^{^}

   I am tagging you because I am expanding the comment starting with this sentence.

Thanks for the comment, Wladimir!

The Cumulative Pain analyses assume that the range of pain intensities varies from No-Pain to Excruciating in any sentient species. This range is needed in the method to make it flexible and adaptable across diverse taxa.

I have one question related to this. Feel free to reply there.

Nevertheless, I personally believe that the range of different intensities of affective experiences evolved to match increasing levels of behavioral options, which are only possible with greater cognitive complexity. A mosquito, with an ephemeral lifespan and very limited behavioral choices, would not have been shaped by natural selection to require a wide range of affective intensities.

In agreement with this, "I guess 1 mosquito-year of fully healthy life is 1.3 % as good as 1 human-year of fully healthy life, which is RP’s median welfare range of black soldier flies^[1]". I would be curious to know if you think the welfare range of mosquitoes is much smaller than 1.3 % as large as that of humans, defining welfare range as the difference between the maximum and minimum lifetime welfare per time^[1].

1. ^{^}

   The welfare range is smaller than the difference between the maximum and minimum instantaneous welfare per time, as the intensity of one instant can be much greater than that of a lifetime.

I've heard people talk about it quite a lot, usually as a joke

Thanks for the comment, Noah.

If one accepts all these assumptions, why would the best course of action be to offset AMF donations rather than to avoid donating to AMF in the first place?

Sorry for the confusion. By "I would move any marginal donations from helping humans to helping invertebrates", I meant I would not donate to AMF. I have now clarified this in the post. "Nonetheless, I think directing a small fraction (10 %?) of one’s donations to helping invertebrates would be a good compromise to offset potential negative effects", even if I think donating just to SWP, WAI or Arthropoda Foundation would be better.

If ITNs cause vastly more harm to mosquitoes than they help humans, wouldn’t this imply that AMF is not just a weak investment, but actually a net-negative intervention? It seems like these numbers, if taken seriously, suggest AMF should be deprioritized rather than merely balanced with shrimp welfare donations.

I do not know whether AMF is beneficial or harmful. My mainline numbers suggest it is harmful, but there is lots of uncertainty, and I have not covered all the relevant effects.

• I neglected the effects of 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. Just accounting for uncertainty in mosquitoes’ capacity for welfare, I estimate the 5th and 95th percentile harm to mosquitoes caused by ITNs are 0 and 11.5 k times their benefits to humans. So it is unclear to me whether ITNs increase or decrease welfare.

I assume that this is mostly about hedging against uncertainty under diff moral theories, but it seems like making this tradeoff of offset compared to counterfactual more money to AMF implies a certain tradeoff that you're okay with such that you should never make the initial investment. 

I'm confused about what sorta epistemic/ moral uncertainty theory someone would need to be offsetting the way you propose. Tbh I've already confused myself with this comment, but I hope it's helpful(?)

I have not thought about this. I just think some people are drawn to offseting, and that donating to animal and human welfare is better than just to human welfare (although I also believe that donating just to animal welfare would be even better).