Returning to this 5 years later, having been reminded of it by Jeff Kauffman's recent post. I'm a bit embarrassed to recall having written this, because in the past few weeks I'd actively resisted being informed about the Alex Bores campaign, despite being fairly close to some of its organizers.
I rate this a 2/5 post retrospectively.
I agree the title is bad and misleading. There are two basic theses going on in here which I still agree with:
Small donors are currently irrelevant in most philanthropic endeavors compared to institutional funding (at the time FTX, and currently Anthropic).
Conversely, if charitable money should be spent on political action, it is best supplied by small donors.
As you pointed out, this is not a complete argument for(3. Small donors should supply money to political action); it's missing (2.1. Charitable money should be spent on political action). That's fine; this could have been deliberately written to expose the partial proof, and signposted that 2.1 still needed a strong case built for it. It would have been more useful in that format.
From Jeff's post linked above, it seems like some people did have this takeaway nevertheless.
But I also know that I wrote this post in a disingenuous way, and dislike it for that reason more than the poor logic. The main point was to drive people towards Elizabeth's potential donor list, and that's a disguised motive that becomes a gotcha towards the end.
I'm not sure how many signatures Elizabeth got from this, but I feel that it would have been both more honest and more effective to just have a convincing direct argument for why you should get on that list, and for me not to have published this piece until I could come up with one.
I think the further work section still roughly holds up. Glad to see Eric Neyman championing work in this vein.
It's been my pleasure to help make Akshyae's career transition happen and watch him hit it out of the park with the Frame Fellowship! Thank you so much for the kind words here :D
Does AMF still conduct follow-up studies on deployments at 6 month intervals, does it still intend to? I don’t see any published since 2019, but between the pandemic and budget shortfalls and what I assume to be fairly predictable study results I’d understand this receiving lower priority in recent years. I am not criticizing, I was just hoping to look into the numbers while doing research for a recent post.
Thanks so much for this! I’d only been thinking about the potential harms to people with fish welfare as a side note. You’re absolutely right that we can get a decent estimate on the added burden of fish suffering here, which will be relevant to the calculations of many EAs
Noting that even with AMF's tracking methodology I'm not seeing strong evidence that nets distributed are not being diverted even within AMF's tracking period:
For example, this survey shows about 36% utilization as intended at the 18 month mark. Since they don't need to be brand new to be used as fishing nets, some portion of the other 64% might be serving an economically productive second life.
https://www.againstmalaria.com/Distribution1.aspx?ProposalID=194
(The link to underlying data sadly appears to be broken at the moment, and no detailed report is provided, only the overview.)
Also, AMF has documented far fewer surveys than 'monitor every distribution effort every six months for three years' as implied by the 2015 article Marzhin cites - actually doing so may be cost prohibited. Furthermore no surveys have been published since 2019, I'm assuming COVID was a major contributor there. All the tracking here:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/Distributions.aspx?MapID=1
Thank you for adding this clarification! It's good to determine whether EA-driven funds are unlikely to be substantially exacerbating the issue. Other bednet distributors besides AMF may have worse outcome tracking methods but that is outside of the EA community scope to discipline.
One minor caveat to your clarification is that many of the nets are reused for fishing only after they are considered too worn out for bednet use, at which point even distributors using AMF's methodology may no longer be tracking their utilization.
One to note here for the sake of epistemic clarity was that my 2021 post (the first link in the article) was essentially fluffing for a post like ASB's (the link in the second paragraph, a case for carrick flynn) to come out later, and I wrote and published it as part of a coordinated political strategy in which I had a minor role. I have some further reflections here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FffuQRBYjvm5hiaFw/there-s-a-role-for-small-ea-donors-in-campaign-finance?commentId=k83FvCDNvhdiovvfc
Returning to this 5 years later, having been reminded of it by Jeff Kauffman's recent post. I'm a bit embarrassed to recall having written this, because in the past few weeks I'd actively resisted being informed about the Alex Bores campaign, despite being fairly close to some of its organizers.
I rate this a 2/5 post retrospectively.
I agree the title is bad and misleading. There are two basic theses going on in here which I still agree with:
As you pointed out, this is not a complete argument for (3. Small donors should supply money to political action); it's missing (2.1. Charitable money should be spent on political action). That's fine; this could have been deliberately written to expose the partial proof, and signposted that 2.1 still needed a strong case built for it. It would have been more useful in that format.
From Jeff's post linked above, it seems like some people did have this takeaway nevertheless.
But I also know that I wrote this post in a disingenuous way, and dislike it for that reason more than the poor logic. The main point was to drive people towards Elizabeth's potential donor list, and that's a disguised motive that becomes a gotcha towards the end.
I'm not sure how many signatures Elizabeth got from this, but I feel that it would have been both more honest and more effective to just have a convincing direct argument for why you should get on that list, and for me not to have published this piece until I could come up with one.
I think the further work section still roughly holds up. Glad to see Eric Neyman championing work in this vein.
It's been my pleasure to help make Akshyae's career transition happen and watch him hit it out of the park with the Frame Fellowship! Thank you so much for the kind words here :D
Does AMF still conduct follow-up studies on deployments at 6 month intervals, does it still intend to? I don’t see any published since 2019, but between the pandemic and budget shortfalls and what I assume to be fairly predictable study results I’d understand this receiving lower priority in recent years. I am not criticizing, I was just hoping to look into the numbers while doing research for a recent post.
Thanks so much for this! I’d only been thinking about the potential harms to people with fish welfare as a side note. You’re absolutely right that we can get a decent estimate on the added burden of fish suffering here, which will be relevant to the calculations of many EAs
I think this summary captured the article's main points quite well. Good bot!
Some extra context on scope: https://www.unicef.org/supply/media/13951/file/LLIN-Market-and-Supply-Update-October-2022.pdf
Noting that even with AMF's tracking methodology I'm not seeing strong evidence that nets distributed are not being diverted even within AMF's tracking period:
For example, this survey shows about 36% utilization as intended at the 18 month mark. Since they don't need to be brand new to be used as fishing nets, some portion of the other 64% might be serving an economically productive second life. https://www.againstmalaria.com/Distribution1.aspx?ProposalID=194 (The link to underlying data sadly appears to be broken at the moment, and no detailed report is provided, only the overview.)
Also, AMF has documented far fewer surveys than 'monitor every distribution effort every six months for three years' as implied by the 2015 article Marzhin cites - actually doing so may be cost prohibited. Furthermore no surveys have been published since 2019, I'm assuming COVID was a major contributor there. All the tracking here: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Distributions.aspx?MapID=1
Thank you for adding this clarification! It's good to determine whether EA-driven funds are unlikely to be substantially exacerbating the issue. Other bednet distributors besides AMF may have worse outcome tracking methods but that is outside of the EA community scope to discipline.
One minor caveat to your clarification is that many of the nets are reused for fishing only after they are considered too worn out for bednet use, at which point even distributors using AMF's methodology may no longer be tracking their utilization.
I haven't - even after this much research I don't feel epistemically confident enough to do so. I welcome anyone else to do it!