"Why does effective altruism buy bed nets instead of investing in gene drives [to eliminate mosquitoes forever]?"

Summary: a friend asked me this question on Facebook. I ended up writing a rather extensive response, and I believe this question will be asked again, so I've written up this answer to be shared as needed. The short answer is effective altruism is a social movement of thousands of middle-class individuals who aren't coordinated enough to invest tens of millions of dollars into a single project, and billionaire investors or philanthropists associated with the movement appear for various reasons not inclined to invest in independent research of this sort. Moreover, while gene drives show promise as technology to eliminate mosquitoes, figuring out the best way to fund research to ensure the best outcome is difficult. 

1. Despite appearances, effective altruism isn't yet a coordinated elite movement that can design top-down solutions to the all the world's problems we want to solve. We're bottom-up movement of viewers just like you.

2. Well, if a few thousand middle-class members of the effective altruism movement can't fund research into gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes, why not all these billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk we see in the headlines? Well, they're more into exclusively funding blue-sky projects and moonshots to save the world. They're the sorts of folks who would fund an EA-style project to use gene drives. Musk, Thiel and the other Silicon Valley billionaires are willing to fund innovation they control themselves, but not the innovation others can provide. It's a Catch-22. This is a problem the effective altruism community hasn't solved yet. Other examples of this trend include:

• Elon Musk and Peter Thiel collectively giving one billion dollars over the next several decades to OpenAI, while neither of them has ever given more than $500,000 in one year to the already-existing Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which may be the primary organization on Earth responsible for making AI safety a legitimate cause rather than sci-fi doomsday nonsense.
• Google establishing biotech company Calico to run the anti-aging revolution in-house, rather than giving more than a relative pittance of their own money to fund the research at the Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence (SENS), which laid much of the groundwork which makes a bold organization like Calico seem plausible in the first place.

If you know a source of or a solution to the problem of billionaire bias whereby they're confident they can save the world by themselves because they're already such supergeniuses, rather than somewhat lucky run-of-the-mill geniuses, and declining to sufficiently fund scientists who aren't billionaires only because they spent the last decade building the fields of research these billionaires have just started paying attention to, we'd be eternally grateful.

Once this problem is solved, not only will we get started on the gene drives, but we'll do the rest of it too.

3. In the meantime, the two billionaires who are more on board with effective altruism are the foundation Good Ventures. Again, the effective altruism movement:

• A. isn't at the scale yet where it can realistically undo bans on DDT[1], if that was a policy we were pursuing, but dang it, it's trying. Seriously, it's beginning to experiment with influencing federal policies in the United States in the last 18 months, but this takes a lot longer than running a RCT for patch solutions like bednets. EA isn’t jumping headlong into influencing any and all policies, because it wants to first find its feet in policy areas which it's confident it can stably influence and which are well within the Overton window, like domestic criminal justice reform.
• B.  Open Phil is looking into funding breakthroughs in scientific research, but it turns out evaluating how to do this strategically, rather than rationalizing coincidental externally-positive innovations and claiming it's a miracle of the peer-review system or whatever, is difficult. So, it takes time to have calibrated confidence in how to make things like gene drives or geoengineering or whatever go off without a hitch. If you think it's easy, go apply to be a researcher at the Open Philanthropy Project. They're hiring.
• C. In the mean time, members of organizations like Giving What We Can and the supporters of Givewell-recommended charities see value in continually donating a couple thousand dollars to AMF here or there because malaria kills hundreds of thousands every year right now, and it's unrealistic for them to think if they spend three years putting that money into their savings account they can build a nest egg which will allow them to bankroll a several-million dollar research program.

Gene drives started existing, like, what six months ago? Why isn't *anyone*, or *everyone* funding this yet? Why didn't the United Nations pass an accord to receive one trillion dollars in funding from the governments of the world to research gene drives the day after this op-ed came out? I would ask you to be more patient with the effective altruism movement. It’s not an omnipotent community.

[1] In a prior comment in the discussion, my interlocutor mentioned how if effective altruism wasn’t willing to invest in gene drives, it could at least try to do something which would more effectively eradicated mosquitoes and prevent the spread the diseases they bear. He stated undoing bans on DDT might be able to accomplish this better than the current strategy of purchasing LLINs on the cheap via AMF. It is this comment I’m referencing. I neither endorse nor condemn a policy of undoing bans on DDT, and I make no claim recommending the effective altruism movement or any associated organization begin doing so.