Insecticide-treated nets significantly harm mosquitoes, but one can offset 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]. So I think 3.92 k mosquito-years of fully healthy life are as good as the additional human welfare from saving 1 life under GW’s moral weights.

This all sounds in earnest. I would say that mosquitos are best utilized as bat food, and I would expect quite a bit of disagreement on the goodness ratio of mosquito-years of life to human-years of life. Fine to kill them fast without suffering, and let's assume they feel pain. But let's not assign any goodness to the viral diseases they bear?

Summary

- According to the GPT Pain-Track from the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP), “Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are not only lethal to mosquitoes but also cause significant suffering before death. When mosquitoes come into contact with the insecticide, their nervous systems are disrupted, leading to intense and prolonged effects. These include uncontrolled movements, convulsions, and muscle spasms, which can last for minutes. This is followed by paralysis and eventual shutdown of their body functions. While effective at reducing disease transmission, ITNs inflict severe pain on mosquitoes during the process, making their impact far from instantaneous or painless”.

- I estimate GiveWell’s (GW’s) last grant to Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) of 41 M$ caused 763 times as much harm to mosquitoes via insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) as it benefited humans.

- 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 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 changing the number of animals. 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. I recommend donating to the Arthropoda Foundation and Wild Animal Initiative (WAI).

- I estimate people donating to AMF can offset the harm ITNs cause to mosquitoes pretty cheaply, donating 1.19 % as much to SWP as to AMF. This fraction is more robust than it may seem because the harm ITNs cause to mosquitoes is decently proportional to the cost-effectiveness of SWP.

- I would move any marginal donations from helping humans to helping invertebrates, so I would not donate to AMF. 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. I encourage people donating to animal welfare to do this too.

EA starts to be undistinguishable from its satire at this point, but you could have made good satire for a lot less effort, so I'll have to go with genuine.

How did the movement even survive SBF antics?