I'm a big fan of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. If you also are interested in making the world a better place, it's worth spending time learning how to communicate better.
Even when you say something that is true, the way you say it matters. As sympathetic as I am to the view that people ought to do the most good, I find your phrasing of this sentiment hard to endorse.
Your goal is probably to encourage more people to give to AMF. You may have better success at expressing how much good AMF does with the money given, and that you would love to see more people considering donating to AMF.
Example: "Donating to AMF and the Malaria Consortium is a very effective way to help people. For $5 you provide a net that protects people from malaria for 3-4 years. This is a very cost-effective way to help others!"
EA is a shrinking movement because it is not effective at utilizing the strongest card philanthropy has. Shame. Donating to domestic charities is shameful, just like hoarding billions of dollars is shameful. Telling people AMF is effective isn't enough, we need everyone to know that other charities are not, otherwise they'll go on immorally donating to causes they care about or people that look like them.
You can shame someone into giving $10 in front of you. Good luck shaming someone to part with >10% of their income through such a negative feeling.
EA has a forum which welcomes (contrarian) opinions. Perhaps you should write up your reasons for thinking that shame is a good motivator with some research backing it up. EAs are very open minded. I'm also willing to change my mind.
The hard part is shaming people without them realizing that's what's happening. Red cross is great at this, but some organizations like PETA have gone to far. Once the shame has sunk in it's important to quickly capitalize by saying stuff about how great AMF is as you said and not double down like PETA does. Singer inadvertently figured this out with the drowning child thought experiment. People don't want to look into a bottomless pit.
Sounds like you're not describing what most people would imagine when they hear "shaming a person". You're aiming for some dark-arts psychological jujitsu.
Even if possible, even if maneuvers like this might work on some people, it is likely harder to pull off something like this consistently (thus creating damage along the way), than to just be up-front-and-honest about the good.
People in general want to come to their own conclusions, and not be told what to do. Telling them "do this" can back fire. Having a discussion, where you inquire about their point of view, and structure a conversation as a collaborative exploration, I think, is better.
Peter Singer's drowning child example is a brilliant argument, and I think one everyone ought to hear about. But I'm unsure if "shame" is what it evokes. It raises an incongruity that people then have to reconcile. And if you're kind and encouraging, providing opportunities for them to become better people (by their own light), they will more-likely do it. If they are shamed, they might end up doing mental gymnastics to conclude that "any argument that makes good people I see around me into bad people is a mistaken argument".
I'm happy to discuss this more. As you can guess it's one of my favorite topics.
Let's take the drowning child. Suppose you save the child and walk by the pond again the next day. There's another child drowning. Do you save it? Suppose you walk by the pond everyday and everyday there's another child drowning. Is there a point where you would not save the child? I think the vast majority of people would eventually stop saving the kid. I think that's because shame is what motivates the decision.Eventually they no longer feel shame pushing them to save the children. If they knew there would be a new child drowning everyday on the very first day would they save the child? I think it's likely that many people would not. Saving the child is admitting you have some responsibility for what happens to it. If you know that you will eventually stop it feels a lot better to never admit you're responsible for the child. Shame is a powerful emotion but once people start meta-thinking about it it's easy for them to get around it with mental gymnastics.
EA is effectively a utility monster, so it's not surprising to me that people mental-gymnastics their way out of it. EA needs to focus more on tractability of these problems and less on the bottomless pit if they want mass buy in. Because in the end donating to AMF doesn't actually feel that great when you it makes you realize hundreds of thousands of children are dying from preventable disease every year. It feels a lot better to pretend the problem doesn't exist so you can ignore the shame and focus on less important issues instead.
Shame being philanthropy's strongest motivator is too cynical a perspective for me. Also, many people take pride in defying those who tell them that they're living their life wrong in some way so I believe shame backfires more often than not.
I have no idea about the details of these charities but to say donating to a charity is immoral seems dumb. Misguided or poorly informed may be a better term, but "imorally donating".
I think Black Lives Matter is a scam (there was a Reddit AMA with a BLM director where people asked where the money goes, she avoided answering the question, plus their aims go far beyond "helping black people") but I don't think people are "immoral" for donating to it, just hopelessly misguided and ill informed.
I agree that the blm organization is a scam. I also agree that the people who donate are naive. If those people realized they can save lives for less than $1000 a pop and still donated to blm they'd be immoral.
Not immoral, just uninformed in my opinion. Immoral would imply that they know they are doing something that is to some extent "wrong" and do it anyway. People donating are trying to do good, but just doing it in an ineffective way. If they know about an effective way to donate somewhere else but still assume that BLM is "doing good" then I would say it's still a long stretch to call it immoral.
That's not a very charitable view. Some people want to help solve problems that are local to them or have personally affected them. There's nothing wrong with that.
Caring about certain groups of people more than others is clearly immoral. When your resources can be used much more effectively wasting them is immoral. We all make immoral decisions everyday though, so I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that.
For some versions of morality, this is true to first order, but it ignores the second order effects. Ultimately, all complex organization, from the level of the cell to the level of the world, can be seen as solutions to the prisoner's dilemma. Defection looks like different things at different levels.
At the level of the cell vs. the body, it's cancer.
At the level of the individual vs. the family, it's adultery or abuse.
At the level of groups of people vs. a city or state, it's organized crime.
At the level of nations vs. the world, it's aggressive war.
It is the most natural thing in the world (literally) for members of an organization/group to preferentially help other members of the group, because there is an expectation of reciprocation, or at least that there would be reciprocation if the shoe were on the other foot.
It can be seen as a measure of progress of a society how large these networks of reciprocation get. It is a great thing when one's circle of concern expands. One thousand years ago, no one was sending resources purely altruistically to people thousands of miles away. To expect the circle of concern to be completely flat though is not an evolutionary stable strategy. The stable strategy is to create more engagement, more interdependency, more common beliefs and habits, so that trust is created, and the concentric circles of concern are progressively flattened.
First, "the most natural thing in the world" has nothing to do with morality. Humans have the ability to reason, so we're able to look past our natural instincts and find the truth.
Second, I agree that having the option to be moral is a great sign of societal progress. I think shaming immoral people is now an effective evolutionary strategy. Social outcasts are less likely to reproduce. Survival of the fittest is no longer about who has the most food(at least in the us). It's now about which culture values reproduction the most is we're looking at the macro scale and usually vapid things like attractiveness on the micro scale.
Saying that "reason" necessarily trumps natural instinct is naive. Your assumption is that your limited experience, knowledge, and cognitive ability are superior to the sum total of all human and animal experience and cognition throughout the aeons.
In group preference and mutual concern exists because it is stable and robust. Even if it doesn't give an optimal utilitarian outcome in the short term, it is capable of perpetuating itself. There is not a single society in history based on purely altruistic principles that has ever survived. Reciprocity is necessary.
No, I'm saying evolution has no reason to take morality into account. In fact, humans evolved to be immoral, if we weren't greedy we'd die. We are no longer in that situation. Being moral had a negative correlation with number of offspring. Arguing that the sum of people greedily trying to survive somehow means being greedy is moral now that it's no longer necessary makes no sense. There is not a single society in history that has had computers other than ours, so I'd say we're in unprecedented times.
I think evolution does take morality into account in a certain way. If you're a utilitarian, in one formulation, you'd say that the good is people being able to satisfy their desires. People form groups, build things together, etc., in general, to satisfy their desires collectively. We are able to satisfy more desires by working together.
My point is that barring genetic engineering or drugs or something else causing us to change our motivational system fundamentally, there will always be some people that are a bit greedier than others. Even if we are collectively materially rich, there are always more things to be acquired, and even if we had unlimited material wealth, there would always be scarce goods like the time/attention/respect of others.
Would you, for example, advocate that one should spend their time with others that they don't like, or even people who behave abusively, as long as these people get a lot of pleasure out of the interaction?
On your second point though, people generally do act morally, and that moral behavior is an evolved trait of a group, because moral behavior promotes the interests of the group. Compared to, say, 50,000 years ago on the savannah, the amount of concern that people show for one another's well being is far higher.
I really don't think people generally act morally at all. Instead I'd say they generally act in a socially acceptable way so as not to become ostracized. Then the question is how well do social norms line up with ethics. Overall it's pretty close, but there are clear areas where social norms are not ethical, such as eating factory farmed meat and donating to domestic charities instead of ones that target the global poor.
Is it your belief then that everyone is immoral? Or do you have any examples of someone maximising possible good?
The most obvious problem with such a system is that you're a bad person regardless of what you do, so there is no value in doing good unless you're a superintelligence. You say as much above- people make immoral decisions (by your evaluation) constantly, so it doesn't really matter whether you do.
You seem to be angling above for a world where people who care about others feel constant shame because they're not doing enough, while selfish, shameless people get to lead happy lives. That seems immoral, even by my much lower standards.
There is never value in doing good outside of the lack of shame it gives you. That doesn't change once you realize eating meat and donating to ineffective domestic charities are immoral. I think labeling people as good or bad is a mistake. We make good or bad choices, but it's impossible to fit us into binary good/bad based off those choices since there's no objective level of good you have to do to be a good person. I don't think you being unhappy with the conclusion means it's wrong.
I find that first sentence shocking. Perhaps we're just different types of people, but I derive a great deal of happiness from making others happy, and, moreover, I think there is fundamental value in increasing the average happiness in the universe. Shame, for me, is chiefly a driver of inaction. I will never not feel it, so why concern myself with it at all? There is always a better choice, so I dedicate time that could be used to make the world a better place (albeit innefficiently) to trying to figure out which choice out of an infinity is best.
I agree that labelling people as good or bad is a mistake. In fact, my issue here is that you explicitly labelled everyone as a bad person. Is this not what you meant to say?
I don't believe I said your conclusion makes me unhappy, my intent was to say that your conclusion is immoral and, as a moral position, it is therefore wrong.
People definition's of good will vary. A strict Muslim and a gay man will probably have quite different interpretations of "good". ISIS probably believe they are acting in a "good" way, it's the strictest interpretation of the word of god after all.
Trying not to do harm would be an easier goal to define.
Is it immoral to care more about your close family (spouse, children, parents) than about strangers? Is it immoral if you care more also about your cousins, grandparents or uncles/aunts? Or does it become immoral when you care more about even more distant parts your family? Or when you care more about your neighbours? Or your compatriots? Where do you draw a line?
Caring more about people who are closer is biological instinct. But if you want to call biology immoral...
Biological instinct has no effect on morality. All else equal, yes it's immoral to care more about your family's well being than strangers, but the downhill effects of that are disastrous due to unhappiness it instinctually causes. Because of that it is usually moral to care about those you are very close with because society would collapse if we didn't.
Ok - but that seems like a loophole in your position that renders it moot.
Since all things are not only never equal, but we can never even tell whether they are or not and since all decisions have an impact on personal happiness and ultimately too much unhappiness would cause society to collapse as you point out, then it is always moral to care about one group more than another if that is a condition of happiness.
That's ignoring the people harmed by ISIS. Clearly the moral decision is to stop abusive ISIS fighters. That doesn't mean babies are more important than them.
> Caring about certain groups of people more than others is clearly immoral.
I don't think it's so clear. That's a bold statement.
First of all, it's obvious that most people care about themselves, their family, their friends, their local community, their online community, etc. more than random people. This is evidenced by thinking of "caring for" people in terms of actions, rather than "caring about" abstract virtues. I care "for" someone by helping them, spending time with them, and by giving to them. I care "about" people in an abstract sense, perhaps by posting or speaking about it, "hope and prayers", taking a moral stand to defend their rights, etc. but not by doing concrete actions for individuals.
I, and most other people (and this almost certainly includes you!) care for those close to us more than we do for those further away, in every sense, because it's what we're more capable of doing meaningfully. So, from a practical standpoint, we're always going to care about certain groups more, purely because we don't actually have the power to care for people that are beyond our reach. The memberships of those groups obviously vary considerably from person to person, but to really care for someone takes time and effort, and we can only give so much.
Second, we have to consider what "moral" means. Arguably, the only morality is civilization; from a game-theoretical standpoint, the most moral actions are those which allow your society and people to thrive, those which allow your genes to propagate. This is how one obeys the genetic imperative, and how one continues to win in the fundamental struggle against nature that life is and has always been. This is what is reflected in the commonalities in law and ethics between all civilizations that have persisted for any length of time. These laws reflect moral values; the moral values reflect evolution, in the sense that if you have self-destructive morals you will not survive long enough to propagate them for a long time.
To maximize this morality, balanced with the capability factor above, one's care for others drops off as some function of the social distance from one's self to others, defined by one's relationships and by the customs of one's society. You help the people you know; you help the people who would help you. Whether this is because of a higher moral precept like the Golden Rule or out of shrewd self-interest doesn't matter - the ideal moral Schelling point is the combination of those two things, after all.
The term "pathological altruism" has been used of late to describe those who expend their resources to help others in ways that damage themselves or their society. For example, if you expend all of your charitable donations and volunteer time helping people who are far away and have no bearing on your own existence one way or the other, there's a huge opportunity cost in comparison to helping the people around you. This is especially salient when there is a disparity, in the sense that nobody from far away is donating to help those close to you either. This results in situations like those in America where homeless veterans, opiate addicts, underprivileged children, etc. are a persistent issue but no matter, because you can get just as much social clout or more from donating to help people halfway around the planet (gladdening many middlemen in the process).
From this perspective, I think it's fair to say that it's plenty moral to care more about certain groups than others. It may even be more moral. Take the log out of your own eye, and so forth.
> When your resources can be used much more effectively wasting them is immoral.
It's very hard to know what is the most effective thing, and so hinging morality on the idea that there's some lower-energy-state solution somewhere else that we didn't find is a bit questionable. It's not like we all have access to CPLEX or a BQM solver with details on every potential outcome for every situation we're in.
The definition of "effective" is also relative. What if I believe it is more "effective" in reality for those I care about to use my resources as described above, to help people whom I can make a real lasting difference for, rather than expending money abstractly helping people I will never meet? Which one is more likely to start a feedback cycle that pushes things upward in my community? Which one is more likely to benefit my descendants generationally, assuming we stay in this area?
Ehh. I don't think you even believe your own point, to be honest.
I don't think the definition of effective is relative. I believe people can have different goals though, so actions that would be effective to one person aren't to another. I don't think it's moral for your goal to be help those in your community at the expense of everyone else. Therefore if you are making moral decisions effective means the choice that will cause the most good per resource.
Do you have a source on this 3000 kids a day? That's over 1M children a year. Assuming most of those are in Africa, you're claiming something like a 2% childhood mortality from malaria alone. The all-cause childhood mortality in Africa is considered astronomical at 7.8%. The WHO (UNICEF) says the death rate of malaria in Africa is more like 1 every 2 minutes, which comes out to 720 a day.
One dead child is too many and I worry that number inflation only makes the fight harder.
That documents lacks a date, but it seems to be old information. Based on [1] and [2] it seems that the numbers given in that document are from around 2005 or before, but there has been a lot of progress since then.
Malaria is just as deadly to adults who have never been exposed to it as it is to children under 5 years old. However the more times you catch it, the more immunity you build to it. An adult who has caught malaria multiples times is not likely to die from it. An adult tourist catching it for the first time can be in trouble.
The discussion around malaria is always really strange to me, because it's so close to home and yet so far away at the same time.
At this point I've frankly lost count of the number of times I've contracted malaria, but I'm willing to bet it's well over fifty. I understand, theoretically, that it kills an obscene amount of people a year, but it doesn't really sink in that it's actually a deadly disease. I've never felt fear for my life while sick with it.
I wonder how much simply having access to the bare minimum of standard healthcare would reduce the number of fatalities per year.
50 times does sound like a lot, but if you're in your mid twenties that only comes out to twice a year. Considering the frequency in my childhood, I think it's honestly closer to seventy or eighty. To be clear, I'm counting cases where I developed symptoms and had to be treated - you do build a tolerance to it over time, to the point that many people get infected with the malarial parasite but don't notice any symptoms (it's not really understood how or why that acquired immunity works, but it does seem to pass from mother to child and persist until the child is about four or so months old).
It starts out with a persistent headache, sometimes a cough (but with no congestion - this is critical for figuring out early enough that it's not just a cold). The most obvious tell though is that some of my muscles start feeling sore and I start feeling inexplicably tired. At this point I would start preparing for a possible full-on case; basically making sure that I have a proper stock of NSAIDs, easy-to-eat foods, multivitamin and mineral syrup, and oral rehydration solution (I measure and make mine with regular sugar and salt) - malaria tends to completely suppress your appetite, and it's vital to keep your blood sugar and iron up even if you can't eat at all.
Sometimes the illness just subsides, but if I find myself developing a fever (usually a day or so after the headache starts) then I immediately make time to go and get tested. The whole process including getting results takes about an hour or two (mostly spent getting to a health care centre). If I'm malaria positive then I get prescribed an artemisinin-based combination therapy and sent home - the test and the full course of therapy are free under most health insurance plans, and cost about $6 to $15 out-of-pocket depending on the brand and hospital (an afterthought for someone in my position, but prohibitively expensive for millions of people who live on $2 a day or less).
The medication course is three days long, and very strict about the dosage - two doses taken eight hours apart, and then four taken every twelve hours afterwards. It's fast-acting enough that most people feel a lot better after the first day of treatment, but you have to complete the course and make sure you're getting excess nutrition even though you feel "fine". If I pick up on things and start the ACT early enough, the fever doesn't have time to develop; sometimes it hits hard/seemingly out of the blue, though, in which case I'd get increasing muscle aches and shivering chills even though the body temperature is climbing and climbing (the chills are extremely deceptive - I've seen people beg for sweaters and blankets while running a fever of over a hundred degrees). I take NSAIDs (usually ibuprofen) to manage the fever, along with warm green or ginger tea to help with the shivering. Once I start sweating, the worst of it is over - it's a sign of the fever breaking.
I usually take time off for the length of the ACT, and I'm generally okay to work by the time I'm done with it. It might take up to a week afterwards for the fatigue and lowered appetite to completely lift though. All in all, it's rather like the flu in that the vast majority of otherwise healthy people just manage it at home, but different in that there's a known, effective treatment for malaria so you can avoid most of the suffering altogether if you can afford to be responsible with your health.
Interesting to read, thanks for writing. I'm getting the impression you know okay much about health care -- for example I had to lookup NSAIDs to know it means "Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs". I wonder if that makes the illness less dangerous to you, and (like you wrote elsewhere) indeed indicates how important a generally good health care system is, to handle malaria. I actually didn't know there's a treatment nowadays.
Interesting to hear about how it feels, physically / health-wise, with chills and muscle aches.
Looking at statistics, apparently most people who die, are children, whilst for the flu, it's old people. That's a pretty big difference I think -- imagine one is 40 years old, and one of one's say, 70 years old parents, or one's 10 years old child, dies.
Malaria is probably going to be one of the hardest maladies to overcome. There was some promise with a vaccine, but it looks like that was fairly disappointing. The selective pressure is so high with malaria that sickle cell anaemia is a fairly common congenital disease that if one is homozygous for can be lethal in early age; conventional medicine has significantly increased life expectancy, but it's still fairly poor. Hopefully, it will be to the point where it can be controlled because the African continent has had its economies ravaged by it.
> A comparison of average per capita GDP in 1995, adjusted for parity of purchasing power, between countries with malaria and countries without malaria gives a fivefold difference (US$1,526 versus US$8,268). In the period 1965 to 1990, countries where malaria was common had an average per capita GDP that increased only 0.4% per year, compared to 2.4% per year in other countries.
That seems like a really egregious case of conflating correlation with causation.
But I wonder how much effort is being put into it though.
Take the Sars outbreak. They tried developing a vaccine, and failed. Everybody just assumed it was impossible to create a vaccine for a coronavirus, as we never had one anyway.
Now with Covid-19, we have multiple vaccines in the third, and final, stage of testing. And we also have a controversial vaccine that has been approved in Russia. All within a couple of months. Why that hasn't been achieved with Sars?
Serious question - Why can't we put our minds to it and kill them all?
Why can't we banish this mass killer and cause of immense suffering to humans and animals alike.
I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they form any vital component of ecosystems apart from obviously spreading disease and applying some adapation pressure - which we could eliminate like we have done with lots of other killers.
>As part of their useful role, the larvae of mosquitoes live in water and provide food for fish and other wildlife, including larger larvae of other species such as dragonflies. The larvae themselves eat microscopic organic matter in the water, helping to recycle it. Adult mosquitoes make up part of the diet of some insect-eating animals, such as birds, bats, adult dragonflies and spiders. They also help pollinate some flowers, when they consume nectar.
AFAICT, the more serious proposals to eliminate mosquitoes target the individual mosquito species that spread disease in areas where there are several other mosquito species that would quickly expand to fill the ecological gap.
Yeah, that's the difficulty. In fits of scratching and waving my arms on camping trips of yore I too have felt the urge to just pour a trillion liters of pesticide over the world and kill all of the little flying bastards in one fell swoop (har har). Problem is, it's actually really difficult to imagine such a plentiful and prodigious species _not_ playing a major food chain role. They're everywhere, and things that eat bugs are everywhere; it would be really hard to imagine their absence not collapsing some part of the food chain.
The only thing that would make sense to me would be to introduce some "invasive species" that eats the mosquitoes, doesn't spread the malaria, and can still be eaten by most of the things that eat the mosquitoes. Still, introducing any invasive species is playing with fire; it's literally impossible to know all the consequences in advance.
I am somewhat uncomfortable with the tech for eradicating a species (genetic bombs etc). It feels like a Pandora’s box.
I get similar vibes to nuclear weapons, like, should we be on this path at all? Does an ethical person walk that path, even for “righteous” ends, or is the ethical move just to sit down in place and make someone else drag you down it.
BUT, letting so many people die when you could help is also unethical. That’s very different from an atom numb... bombs don’t save lives.
Still, the idea of weapons that are sexually transmitted and eradicate branches of the tree of life is just a bone chilling concept.
I wonder if you would have written that, if your partner or sibling was dead from malaria.
I guess it feels different, when the affected people live far away.
I'd worry about global climate change, and do something related to that, not worry about "too few mosquitos". I read it's 400k people dead yearly from malaria.
Almost certainly I'd feel different. To be absolutely clear, I find the case for eradication to be extremely compelling for exactly that reason. The risk I have in my head that I want to mitigate, and which makes me unsure of where I stand on this issue, is not any sort of ambiguous "humans shouldn't play god" or "live and let live" or anything like that. The obverse risk we should consider when fiddling with an ecosystem on such a grand and potentially irreversible scale is whether we will accidentally disrupt the food supply in a way that's more catastrophic than the current catastrophe that is malaria.
There aren't many catastrophes worse than the current state of malaria, I absolutely agree and we in the western world ought to take it much more seriously. However, there are possible catastrophes that are much much worse, and fiddling with low level food chains is one of those actions that might open us up to such risk.
Again, not sure where I stand. What I do know is, presumably like you, I think we are not taking this seriously enough and addressing it with all the might that it deserves.
That stance is only correct if you are reasonably certain that killing off those mosquito species will not result in more deaths from knock on effects.
at the same time: Imagine if in the US: there was a new poisonous snake that killed 400 000 people.
Someone said: Let's exterminate that type of snake.
Then, do you think someone from the US/Europe/Australia would have replied "but maybe the snake is an important part of the ecosystem" ?
Would that have been a bit like not putting out a fire burning down a city,
because maybe the fire might cause certain unknown nuts to grow into plants and trees, the following years, and maybe maybe those trees were important somehow?
Immediately start exterminating those malaria carrying mosquitos, without finding out how that'd affect the ecosystem.
Then, in parallel, start studies and research about how the ecosystem might get affected, and if very surprisingly (?), those effects seems like worse than 400 000 people dead, then rethink the exterminate-mosquitos project.
(GGP, ethanbond: Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh / not-so-polite in my reply. Turns out that was actually an a bit interesting comment / thing to think about, to me.)
No harm no foul, my friend! This is an issue worth being legitimately upset about :) There are plenty of people who argue against sterilization with frankly bullshit arguments when you weigh them against the suffering that malaria inflicts. Those people should be outright dismissed. However there are also good arguments for treading very, very carefully here. It's really tricky and we need more people caring, more people thinking about how we can navigate this.
Makes me wonder if you live in one of the bigger cities? There're fewer mosquitos in the cities?
Whilst if living in a village on the country side, and one uses the malaria nets, maybe that's different? (malaria bigger problem?)
Edit: now I just noticed in a recent comment you wrote that you have "lost count of the number of times [you] have contracted malaria". Ok so that's a very different reason, than what I would have thought. Makes me even more curious about if you live in one of the big cities, or on the countryside /edit
> antipoverty infrastructure
What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?
Stagnant water isn't a rural exclusive, and increased population density isn't a great way to slow transmission of a disease spread by an insect that relies on blood to reproduce. Either way, I've lived/been raised in a range of environments, from rural to the megacity I currently live in.
And yes, I've contracted malaria numerous times since I was a small child (much more frequently as a child, actually - it's slowed down to twice or so a year as an adult, due to partial acquired immunity). I'm not even an outlier in that regard; many people I know have a similar case history. We "survived" largely by virtue of being well-fed on varied, balanced diets and having informed, attentive parents who could afford to care for us properly (this sounds more complicated than it actually is - it's mostly making sure the child keeps to the medication schedule, taking steps to reduce the fever and providing enough sugar and iron to offset the worst of the hypoglycaemia/anaemia). If that sounds like a ridiculously low bar, that's because it is - and yet, it's a bar that millions of people fail to clear due to poverty.
> What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?
Short to medium-term, access to power and internet. The power grid is an embarrassment, internet infrastructure even more so. And a lot of other potential measures rest on those two - for example, it would be much easier/faster to provide financial services to the millions of unbanked/underbanked (or to provide supplementary education) over the internet, and having enough power to preserve food properly would go a long way in improving nutrition (all the way up to improving the efficiency of the supply chains).
Long-term, education. Illiteracy is a near-insurmountable barrier to economic advancement.
One more thing comes to my mind: Overpopulation. Number of people growing faster than what hospitals and universities etc can be created?
And from what I've read elsewhere, the things you mentioned: health care, safe food supply, and education, is a good way to handle the problem with overpopulation -- since when people know there's a basic safety net, with health care and food, there's no need to have many children who can help out, when one is old.
> If that sounds like a ridiculously low bar
Yes and I'm actually a bit surprised. And now I understand better why good health care & anti-poverty things are that important for handling malaria
> How could we kill all mosquitos without killing all other insects?
Narrowly tailored insecticides are actually quite feasible. They are just quite a bit more expensive to develop than the indiscriminate kind so we rarely do so.
The key for a narrowly tailored insecticide is to base it on the hormones that regulate the insect's behavior. Insects are in many ways like little biological robots with a bunch of preprogrammed subroutines built in, with hormones triggering calls to those subroutines.
Say you have an insect that on the first summer evening above some certain threshold temperatures forms swarms two meters above patches of blue flowers next to ponds, where it mates, then the females lay eggs and die.
All those steps will be triggered by hormones. If you can identify the hormone that is released by the summer evening hitting the temperature threshold and synthesize that, then you might be able to spray an area with that hormone during the spring. That can then trigger the whole sequence of swarming, mating, egg laying, and dying to start early--before the weather is warm enough for the eggs to by viable, or even before the insects of reached sexual maturity so that the mating does not even produce fertilized eggs.
There are at least two very good things about this approach.
1. The insects do not evolve immunity.
2. The hormones for one insect are generally not harmful to things that eat those insects. Since those hormones already occur naturally in the insect, their predators are already exposed to them. All we are doing is messing with the timing.
These are expensive to develop because you have to really know the target insect. You need people to study its lifecycle in detail to identify what subroutines it has in its little insect behavior library. You need to identify the hormone triggers that affect the behaviors that you might want to use.
You probably also should verify that you have right insect. There was a case where an invasive species of moths (I think) was devastating crops in one state. In the state the moths were native to they were naturally kept under control by a parasitic wasp species that was also native there. An attempt was made to import the parasitic wasps (this was deemed low risk because the wasps could not survive without the moths, so once the invasive moths were gone the wasps would die too).
It was a good plan, and it would have worked except for one little detail. It turned out that there were actually two species of parasitic wasps that were almost indistinguishable. Only one of the two was a parasite for the invasive moth species. The other was a parasite for a different moth.
It wasn't until after the imported wasps failed to do anything about the moths that entomologists took a closer look and realized there were two species, and all the wasps that had been trapped for export to fight the moths had been collected in a place that had the wrong species.
Anyway, the bottom line is that you have to know your target really well to do the hormone based approach. And because it is so effective you can easily end up with an insecticide that will wipe out most of the target in a region, so you don't get repeat customers until maybe years later when the insect starts to make a comeback.
So you end up with an insecticide that was expensive to develop, might have a highly variable market, targets just one species, and most of the R&D for it does not really help with the next one you develop for the next species. That's just not economically worth it in most cases for most insecticide companies.
It might be worth it in this one case, though, perhaps as a publicly funded project. A lot would depend on how many different species of mosquitoes are involved. If only one or two are responsible for most malaria spread, it could be worth it. If there are dozens that are significant spreaders it might not be feasible.
Being peaceful by nature, but also highly allergic to mosquitos, I'm cool with completely eradicating these little flying vampires and the ecological collapse that would ensue. Or not as the case may be https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html
Only 200 out of 5,000 known species of mosquitoes feed on mammalian blood. If we could only target those 200, we could remove a great source of misery from the planet.
In fact, only 8 species carry disease, e.g. zika, malaria.
That said, mosquitoes have been around for 100 million years and it seems unlikely we can wipe them out without some scary technology.
Probably for the foreseeable future we're going to have to settle for managing the problem, draining malarial swamps and encouraging predator species like dragonflies for example.
How does that work? I moved to a civilised place in Italy, where the swamps have been drained centuries ago etc etc; there is no malaria anymore.
Yet, nowadays there are tons of mosquitos, I have nets on all my windows and doors and yet I have to occasionally kill them either mechanically (I'm getting good at it but still) or using poisons.
My <1y child has huge reactions when bit; I tend to stay inside because it's so annoying to get bit all the time; sprays work but not 100%, as if those mosquitos are adapting against the poisons we throw at them.
Are these non malaria-carrying mosquites more adapted to breed with less water?
Did we stop doing a good job draining the swamps?
Different species have different attributes. The tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) from SE Asia is invasive in the Americas and carries nasty diseases -- yellow fever, dengue, zika, chikungunya. It's a highly aggressive biter, highly adapted to marginal environments, and can breed in a tiny pool of water the size of a bottle cap. It tends to be active in human-settled areas. If ever a mosquito deserved to be wiped out, it's this one.
I'm not sure about Italy; I imagine you have plenty of species migrating up from Africa. If you have a lot of mosquitoes, probably there is a water source they're breeding in -- a pool, an old tire, a nearby pond? If you can find a breeding source, dump a mosquito puck in it -- a safe algae that kills mosquito larvae.
There was an attempt to control the population of Zika-carrying mosquitoes in Brazil by introducing supposedly sterile GM mosquitoes. The GM mosquitoes ended up breeding [0]. I'm all for killing them all, but it doesn't seem easy.
> However, it was already known from previous laboratory experiments that a small proportion of about three to four percent of OX513A descendants can reach adulthood;
It was flawed from the beginning. The attempt got basically the exact result one would expect, and was reasonably successful in reducing the mosquito population. It was just not good enough.
We already have a surefire low tech mosquito killer - mosquito bats or zappers. They work well, no chemicals just electricity and batteries.
We however don't have sharp eyes to track the movement of the stealth suckers. Nor the reflexes to position the bat at the right time while pressing the buzzer.
Blow up the size of the mosquito bat to foldable 6ft x 4ft mosquito killer and let probability do its work.
The humans in the room are all the attractant this mosquito killer from hell would need.
Perhaps in the tech bubble it might by common knowledge. Out of it most people don't know.
I wonder if Jobs was nearly as charitable... edit, google says nope:
> He bought an Alfa Romeo car for one of his girlfriends, Tina, and paid off Laurene's student loans. He also kept two cars- a Porsche and a large silver Mercedes-- for himself.
https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf