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XFrequentist comments on Fighting Mosquitos - Less Wrong
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Comments (73)
I don't see any reason to only target those that transmit diseases. Target ones that are simply annoying because they string the average person, gives everyone a clear reason to support the proposal. There are also people with allergies or who simply don't heal the stinged area very well.
If you have to continue paying a few million each year to keep the mosquito population near zero that's no problem for any industrialized country if there's public will.
Don't worry as far as biological imprecision goes. I don't invest the kind of effort required for being precise for a LW post to explore the idea but I would certainly invest the necessary effort if I wrote an actual petition and tried to make it viral.
I also made a choice against immediately crossposting to the effective altruism board or other venues to be able to iterate based on feedback.
According to the map on Wikipedia we don't have any aedes albopictus in Germany but 4 neighboring countries have them. That means that it's not a valid target for German activism. Otherwise do you disagree with that map?
This is a good point - in fact, a distinction is usually drawn between "nuisance" and "disease vector" mosquito control (they can involve very different operations), and I've heard very knowledgeable people say that the only way to maintain public support for a control program is if there's a strong nuisance component. You may be right on this, but note that I never contended otherwise (albopictus is both an efficient disease vector and a major nuisance).
Oh sure, but that's not eradication! There are lots of mosquito population suppression programs around the world, many paid for with public funds (particularly in areas with lots of outdoor tourism and a strong local business influence in municipal politics). Programs like this work at even vastly sub-country spatial scales, but as you say you need to keep doing them year in year out. Part of the beauty of eradication is no longer needing ongoing investment.
Good!
Well, species distribution maps are notoriously tricky to get right, but suppose it's right. The beauty of albopictus as a target is it's a highly invasive species, happy to set up shop anywhere a little pot of water with some organic residue can be found (and perhaps an annual mean temperature >11C, though I'm not convinced by the data on this). I would imagine Germany is at risk of invasion, which is an awesome opportunity for activism - (almost) no one minds local eradication of an invasive species!