Folks are dunking on a tweet and, indirectly, the underlying research connecting mosquito nets to the degredation of seagrass meadows.
I’ll be honest, the implication that free mosquito nets are net negative for poverty and health sent me into that special kind of rage that can only be fomented by someone on the internet being both condescending and egregiously wrong at the same time. Do I even need to go over why this is bad? Why malaria prevention at a continental level outweighs hypothesized marginal seagress loss? I didn’t think so.
What I want to talk about is is subfield tunnel vision. A common piece of advice passed on to each generation of PhD students is to become a genuine expert in something. If you write a dissertation on the effect of malaria nets on elementary school attenance in Uganda, then you should become an expert, on the bleeding edge of all related-research, on mosquitos, nets, and primary education in Africa. As you career takes shape, the both the questions that strike you as important and the opportunities presented to you by institutions and administrators will shape your research. Bit my bit you will be shaped (and occasionally sanded down) into an ever-narrower expert. And that’s fine, that’s the story of incentives to specialize that comes for us all (NB: if your mind went to one of the public intellectual generalists you admire, do note that being a generalist in the modern world is very much its own niche specialty).
Specialization is good, but do take care that while your expertise becomes narrower that your view of world remains wide. We all know the relevant cliche about all the world becoming a nail whilst holding a hammer, but this is about about the rationalizing of tools and techniques. This is about how your specialization fits within the world and, more specifically, how the consquences of choices you might advise stand in the grand utilitarian calculus.
The authors of the paper in question are the Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Conservation Officer of Project Seagrass. These are people who have dedicated their lives to the preservation of seagrass meadows and, in turn, ocean health and the global stock of fish. Should we be surprised that their paper’s abstract closes with “We conclude that the use of mosquito nets for fishing may contribute to food insecurity, greater poverty and the loss of ecosystem functioning”? No, we should not. First, you could argue that they are just putting, in words, the implied signs of their analysis, and not the relative magnitudes. Maybe they aren’t implying mosquito nets are a net negative. You could be generous and argue that all they are trying to say is “Mosquito nets are great, but as soon as the malaria vaccine is universally distributed we should ditch all these nets because the costs will outweigh the benefits.
I don’t think they are, though. They lean heavily on Short et al (2018) and their claim that fishing nets are the primary use of freely provided mosquito netting. That Short et a result appears to be based almost entirely on an online survey with 113 respondents. The implication is that the massive reduction in malaria specifically attributed to the distribution of free mosquito nets is in fact a mirage, that these nets are instead finding their way into the ocean as improvised capital for small scale fishing operations (“artisanal fishing”, in the parlance of the paper), with the resulting consequence of catching additional juvenile fish at the margin, harming the future stock of fish.
The second part of that equation seems entirely feasible! Unintended costs happen. What I want to emphasize is that the authors are narrowly focused on establishing the cost of future fish in seagrass meadows while also being overly credulous of what is, I’m sorry, a ridiculously crappy survey that dismisses the enormous benefits of those nets to save human lives, especially children under the age of 5.
I don’t think the authors are being selfish, have ill-motivations, or have been bought off by a global conspiracy of wealthy fishery magnates. I just think they have succumbed to a bias that afflicts every scholar at one time or another, myself included. Gatekeepers won’t publish your paper in top journals, fund your research with needed grants, or invite you to prestigious conferences unless you hype your work to the absolute maximum of feasible importance. Spend a couple years as the conductor on your subfield’s hypetrain and maybe you start to believe it just a wee bit too much. Your subject of concern remains concrete, the questions imperative, while everything else increasingly fades into the realm of the abstract, the consequences negotiable.
As for the twitter commenter being dunked on, I just think it’s classic overeagerness to denigrate everything touched by someone you find odious. SBF is a bad person, did bad things, has bad hair. Sure, but maybe don’t? Maybe leave the most successful malaria prevention endeavor in the history of the world out of your public disgust for a <checks notes> young cryptocurrency embezzler? Don’t let your deserved anger for a genuinely bad person make you dumber at the margin. Bad people already impose costs on us all. Letting them skew your view of everything they touch just makes their societal footprint bigger.
Economist Writing Every Day 