This is an impactful opportunity, worth dedicating a little amount of time!

Fantastic post, very clear. This is a very important topic.

Thank you for this comment. While I initially found the analysis of Vetted Causes plausible and worth addressing, your comments (and ACE) made me update positively in your favor. They were very clear and constructive. I changed my mind on this topic. 

I am now concerned that Vetted Causes 1/ Continues to make strong claims suggesting ill-intent, when this can be explained by honest mistakes from their or Sinergia's part 2/ Is not trying to discuss these matters with the charity beforehand, which would save a lot of time and reputational harm to everyone (including us readers who have to wait days before getting the position of both sides). This doesn't look good. 
 

Note: I think you got some downvotes on this comment because you reused the same text four times in this comment thread. This is probably not good for readability. I think next time you can just make this one comment and link to it elsewhere.

Great! Good to know.

On a personal level, I’ve really loved covering topics like invertebrate welfare, global health, and wild animal suffering, and I’m very sad we won’t be able to do as much of it.

There's something I'd like to understand here. Most of the individuals that an AGI will affect will be animals, including invertebrates and wild animals. This is because they are very numerous, even if one were to grant them a lower moral value (although artificial sentience could be up there too). AI is already being used to make factory farming more efficient (the AI for Animals newsletter is more complete about that).

Is this an element you considered? 

Some people in AI safety seem to consider only humans in the equation, while some assume that an aligned AI will, by default, treat them correctly. Conversely, some people push for an aligned AI that takes into account all sentient beings (see the recent AI for animals conference).

I'd like to know what will be 80k's position on that topic? (if this is public information)

I find it very difficult to determine whether the future will be net-negative or net-positive (when considering humans, factory-farmed animals, wild animals, and possibly artificial sentience). 
This makes it very hard to know whether work on extinction reduction is likely to be positive or not.
I prefer to work on things that aim to move the sign towards "net-positive".

I followed the whole process and still I am super impressed by the whole approach!

Very few orgs go through the process of looking at everything that can be done and choosing the best opportunity. Especially with suffering reduction as the main goal. I'd love it if more orgs were able to do that.

Excellent post.

Very interesting.

I'd prefer if you pasted the post's content directly into the forum so I could avoid an unnecessary click (plus, the post isn't that long).

However, the post makes compelling arguments, and at least based on your data, it seems Sinergia makes overblown claims. Worth digging into.

I'd love to see how ACE and Sinergia respond to this.

Really? I haven't seen that. 

I've seen rapid joke comments about the killing of mosquitoes, but it's pretty rare that people talk about the suffering caused by insecticides - especially in an attempt to quantify and compare seriously.

If anybody else has done a serious analysis, I'd be interested. But I don't expect much more depth than arguments similar to "these AI safety people believe in terminator sci-fi scenarios, how silly".

Thanks for writing this. 

This is an important consideration that almost nobody has talked about (hence my comment that flagged the topic).

Despite the uncertainty, this might well change completely the expected value of bednets, if they are not accompanied with some actions such as donations to offset the negative effects.