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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20204 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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No, they aren't The utter refusal of EA's to actually look at what happens after they implement their policies, and update accordingly, is breathtaking. It's amateur hour "reasoning from 1st principles" all the way down: Malaria is devastating! Malaria nets are cheap and easy to use! Give Africans Malaria Nets! ← stop here, completely refuse to think if there are any second order effects to take into account, or consider what, if anything, could go wrong, then loudly insist that you are, in fact, very smart.

Austin doesn't strike me as a lunatic but the way he writes about her reeks a bit romantic. Oh no!

This will come across as "uncharitable," but show this announcement to 100 of your normie coworkers and 100% of them will answer "They're fucking. No doubt about it."

Edit: Hold the phone, this is the organization that got $500k from FTX, and is currently fighting to not have to give it back? We're well past "good optics"

Nothing in that article actually says that malaria nets aren't saving lives.

If people are using them to fish with, it's pretty clear that (at least) those particular nets are indeed not helping stop malaria at all?

Austin is married with his wife only days away from popping out the sprog ("...and my wife is due to give birth ~5 days and didn't want to worry about the announcement while on paternity leave"). Let's hope for the sake of all concerned that there is no workplace romance going on, always a terrible idea and Caroline should be well aware from what happened the first time round that it's even more of a terrible idea.

(Also this is the second time I've seen "paternity leave" mentioned online in the context of a female, is this a Californian thing?)

It's a progressive state thing to also give the father some time off to spend with their newborn. It's in addition to maternity leave.

To be fair, the EA side does have numbers and did look at them hard. They can give numbers for malarial infection rates and deaths, both in before/after, difference-in-difference, and comparing high-malarial and low-malarial-risk environments to make sure they weren’t getting some spurious signal. There were even a couple times this lead to use of different insecticides chasing maximized numbers.

The bigger problem is how real the numbers they looked at are. The infection rates at least have some random sampling going on, but it’s a tiny fraction with some selection effects crawling back in. The bigger problem is fatality rates, which are derived from a mix of ‘verbal autopsy’ and modeled estimates from infection rates. But the verbal autopsies are known to be terrible, and the models use local funding of anti-malarial supplies as an input. Start backing them out and you end up with 10x to 20x variations that might be real or might be sampling on the dependent variable. Worse, almost all of the modeled effects (and even the difference-in-difference studies) give drastically higher results than the early RCTs, often 2-3x, and they themselves depended on comparing against people sleeping without nets at all, a scenario that basically doesn’t exist. That’s not impossible, but it’s reason to treat them with a massive grain of salt.

But on the gripping hand, the pessimistic numbers still involve at minimum tens of thousands of lives saved, and more likely hundreds of thousands. It breaks the economic argument, but not the raw effect.

The fishing nets thing is an annoying problem from an environmentalist perspective, but it’s ultimately a rounding error. There’s not much risk of fishery depletion from these nets, very little of the target areas rely on fishing for a big source of calories, and the chemicals aren’t that toxic to mammals. It’s a hundred-life problem, not a hundred-thousand-life problem.

Come on dude. EA organizations make and publish analyses of effectiveness all the time, it's their whole thing. Here is an EA blog post about bednet misuse I found in a minute of searching. As it mentions, Givewell commissioned Rethink Priorities to research use of bednets in fishing:

Based on the available data, Rethink Priorities estimates that only 1.2% of bednets globally are repurposed for fishing.

Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:

For example, GiveWell estimates that only 60% of recipients will use their nets consistently and correctly. After accounting for this, they still find bednets to be extremely cost effective, with every thousand nets saving a life in expectation. That 400 will not be used correctly— and that 12 might be used for fishing— is already baked into the calculation.

And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:

The typical study design involves randomly assigning groups of people to receive (or not receive) nets. Researchers then wait to see whether mortality and malaria rates differ between the two groups. There is never an assumption that everyone who receives a net will use it. And yet, such studies consistently find that nets reduce child mortality by around 17 percent.

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