My name is Saulius Šimčikas. I’m currently studying to become a psychotherapist. Previously, I worked as an animal advocacy researcher at Rethink Priorities for four years. I also did some earning-to-give as a programmer, did some EA community building, and was a research intern at Animal Charity Evaluators. I love meditation and talking about emotions. I’m no longer actively engaged in EA, but I still care about doing good. Hence, I’m still happy to answer questions about my past work, review stuff, consult about related questions, or even help with some cost-effectiveness estimates or something.
saulius
Karma: 6,638
We Should Build Human-Empowering Software
Thank you for the answer. I am not super rich, but I still think it matters where the money I do have goes. And I’m asking about it publicly partly because because of a hope that maybe someone else here also realise that they don’t want to be invested into these companies through index funds. I personally don’t campaign for regulations regarding AI and don’t currently plan to so the bias is not a concern for me personally, I just want less money going towards AI
Is it harmful to keep your money in index funds? Let’s take a random index fund like FTSE Global All Cap Index Fund. If we look at the companies it actually invests in, a lot of them are the same companies that work towards advancing the AI.
It would be ironic for some of us to be in favour of pausing AI and invest money into it at the same time. I used to keep some of my money in such funds because that was always the financial advice for regular folk like me who don’t know/think much about investments. But now I don’t know what to do because this feels bad. I switch some of my funds to FTSE Developed Europe ex U.K. Equity Index Fund because that has maybe twice less investment into AI but that still feels not great. Any advice for me?
Edit: I think I want advice not only about where to invest (which is appreciated), but also whether it’s the right way to think about it. Maybe it doesn’t matter what I invest in because something something efficient markets, but I think this doesn’t apply to AI hype? Or would I offset my investment by a relatively small donation to AI safety efforts? Or maybe not because it’s often not even clear if those are net-positive...
You are right that my use of the word ‘probability’ for the yellow line was a bit misleading. 1% decrease in the yellow line could mean either
1% chance that there is no more animal farming because of an x-risk or something
1% reduction in meat production due to alt proteins
I should say though that based on my conversations at the time, it seemed unlikely that alt proteins will make a big difference.
The section Invertebrates in the article documents some studies that suggest that invertebrates are not directly affected by noise, unless the source is less than a meter away
Even though I expressed some scepticism about wild animal welfare work in the past, I am excited about this initiative. I’d consider donating to it if I was in a position to donate.
Wow, I was about to write a similar comment, but you said it much better than I would have.
I just have a question about the “farms that operate at 80% full capacity.” Are you sure there are many such farms? I’d imagine most operate on thin margins, so it would be unusual for them to have unused sheds or significant spare capacity without a good reason. That said, Vasco listed other ways farmers could increase supply to meet demand quickly without building new farms in this comment. For what it’s worth, LLMs seem to disagree about how important such effects are.
To me, perhaps a bigger issue is anticipation. Once investors know that new farms face a high risk of being blocked or delayed by protests, they may (a) decide not to build farms at all (but someone else might build them instead), (b) shift their plans to other countries where protests are less likely, or (c) submit more planning applications than they really need, expecting some to be blocked. And if investors in other countries see a disruption in UK supply, they might also respond by building more farms abroad. If that’s true, the first few farms blocked might have much more impact than those blocked later, once the market has adjusted to the likelihood of farm-blocking efforts.
This is great, thanks for writing this. It gave me some clarity about something I’ve been confused about for a long time.
Btw, another effect to consider is anticipation. Investors in Poland already know that new farms face a high risk of being blocked or delayed by protests. Given this, they may (a) decide not to build farms at all (but someone else might build them instead), (b) shift their plans to other countries where protests are less likely, or (c) submit more applications than they really need, expecting some to be blocked. Since the campaign has been active for years, it’s possible the market has already adapted to the reality that building new farms in Poland is unusually difficult, and has found alternative ways to meet the demand.
No, I did not think about the effects you listed when choosing these numbers, at least not explicitly. I don’t remember what exactly went through my head when I imputed these numbers. I think I was just trying to imagine what a chicken production graph would look like with or without campaign. Naively thinking, blocking a farm would postpone the production by at least 1-2 years, because that’s how long it probably takes to get planning permits and build a farm. But 1-2 years felt like too optimistic though, so I was conservative, but probably not conservative enough.
Either way, those figures of years of impact are guesses in the spirit of If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics, not estimates. I was supposed to finish the project and had no idea how to estimate these things, so I entered somewhat random numbers. Please don’t take them seriously. I think you would be much better off ignoring them, and coming up with a new estimate from scratch. Clearly you are thinking about this much more deeply than I was.
I am taking a break from research and I won’t try to understand what you wrote here because it’s currently over my head and that’s not the type of thing I want to focus on right now in life. You can talk with Jakub Stencel if you are interested on improving my estimates, he would tell you whether it’s worth it (he is on the forum you can just tag him). But you might also need to talk to someone who say works on the stop the farms campaign for some context. They say that there will be protests against new farms no matter where they are built within Poland because of the network Anima created, but in most other countries it’s not happening. To me the bigger question is if the campaign is even net-positive, because it might just shift production to countries where it’s more difficult to improve conditions for farmed animals.
Some random thoughts about your message:
* I did look into elasticities during my project and other elasticities of chicken can be found in this very old ACE spreadsheet and in this paper which analyzes elasticity some years ago in Turkey and says “According to the supply and demand functions for chicken meat, supply elasticity is 0.377 and demand elasticity is 0.030”. I remember comparing the two and getting wildly different numbers.
* I will say that tI still don’t understand what you mean that “the reduction in the demand/supply of chicken meat is 16.7 % (= (1 − 0.76)*0.695) of the annual production of the targeted farms.” I mean, if we say closed a farm of a million broilers, in the very short term at least, surely the reduction of the number of broilers farmed in the world is one million. It’s not like those other chickens instantly appear somewhere else. So to me the question is still how quickly market goes back to equilibrium. Your variable Delta_t_S and my guess of 0.695 years of impact seem like two different things by the way. Maybe the reduction in production for a closed farm is 16.7% × “the lifetime of a farm”? Plus a bit more because it would take the market some time to adjust?
I saw cumulative elasticity factor being used for impact estimations of veganism. I get it: if some people stop buying chicken, and now only 900 are sold at $1, the price might drop to $0.9. Then the question of how much production contracts is where elasticities come in. But with production shifts it feels different, messier. If we assumed that vegans would start eating chicken again once the price falls, then even the veganism case would be just as confusing.
Thanks Vasco. I still don’t see how such a multiplier would solve the core issue for me. Say a chicken costs $1 and 1,000 of them are produced and sold. Market is at equilibrium. We close down a farm, and now 900 are produced and sold, and the price goes up. The real question for me is how quickly the market adjusts back—how soon someone else builds another farm to fill that gap. I have no idea. I’ve never seen an economic metric that directly measures that speed of recovery. If an economist were to estimate it, I imagine elasticities would be part of the picture, but I don’t know how that estimate would actually look. So at this point, I’d rather not introduce a multiplier that might confuse me and readers without solving the problem I’m trying to get at.
Hi Vasco, I’m commenting here because you asked for my opinion on this article in a private message. From what I see, it assumes that nematodes have moral significance. Personally, I don’t care about nematodes, and I don’t think any text could change that. My caring comes from the heart, and my heart just isn’t open to caring about nematodes. So I’m not very interested in the article, since its starting assumptions don’t align with my values. I hope you understand, and I wish you a good day💚
There seems to be a pattern where I get excited about some potential projects and ideas during an EA Global, fill EA Global survey suggesting that the conference was extremely useful for me, but then those projects never materialise for various reasons. If others relate, I worry that EA conferences are not as useful as feedback surveys suggest.
At EAG London 2025, I was in two meetups ran with this format. Wild Animal Welfare meetup turned out to be extremely valuable, there were so many important quick wins! However, it worked averagely at the digital minds meetup, not much came out of the “quick wins” and “quick requests” parts. I think the difference was that the Wild Animal Welfare meetup mostly consisted of people who are actively working on the topic, so there were actual projects they could use help with. While at the digital minds meetup, people in my groups mostly just had a general interest in exploring this exotic cause area
Many in EA focus on preventing a future self-improving superintelligent agent that might pursue some alien goal misaligned with human values. But this podcast made me realise that such an agent already exists—not as a conscious entity, but as an emergent, decentralized system. It’s what Scott Alexander called Moloch: the dynamics of markets, algorithms, status games, and incentive structures that collectively form a kind of self-improving, misaligned intelligence.
Screen time is one of the proxy goals it optimises for—not because anyone chose it, but because attention is monetisable. And now, Moloch is building more powerful AI, which risks accelerating its agenda, including screentime. A generation raised like this could bring us closer to something like Idiocracy—a society overwhelmed by problems, but cognitively unequipped to solve them. Maybe reducing harmful-type screentime isn’t just a public health move, maybe it’s part of fighting back.
What worries me even more is how AI will amplify this. We might soon have personalized AI content designed to be even more addictive. Individual echo chambers crafted by AI to maximize engagement. Right now, AI mostly selects existing content to recommend—but soon, it could create content directly for each user, optimized purely for engagement.
Hi Yaroslav. That’s a touching story. I read your LessWrong post and the first page of your website. I think the reason you’re struggling to get feedback might have to do with how your ideas are presented.
Your LessWrong post starts with high-level reflections and personal experiences, and only near the end briefly describes what your actual product is. But even after reading it, I’m still not sure what the product does. It seems to be some kind of programming tool or language—but how would someone use it? What can it do that other tools can’t? Why would a developer want to use it?
That’s not a criticism of the ideas themselves—it’s just a communication gap, and those are solvable. I’d recommend starting with something like an elevator pitch—just 1–2 sentences that clearly explain what the product is, who it’s for, and why it’s exciting. There are lots of good materials online about writing elevator pitches, and even LLMs can help generate one if you feed them the right structure.
And beyond that, I’d focus on describing concrete use cases. Even if the product isn’t ready for them yet, people need to imagine what they could do with it. Right now, there’s a big gap between the high-level vision (“compete with AGI”) and the technical details (like AVL-tree example), with very little in between.
Also, I’m not sure LessWrong is the right audience. You might have better luck reaching out to communities interested in new programming languages, formal methods, or open-source developer tooling. ChatGPT suggested places like Hacker News, r/ProgrammingLanguages, and IndieHackers.
Finally, I think the idea of “humans becoming superintelligent” is intriguing but maybe too ambiguous. If you mean “augmenting human cognition through tooling,” that’s a very interesting and valuable direction. But it might help to use more precise language to avoid confusion with the more common definition of superintelligence (i.e., vastly beyond human capability in all domains).
Hope some of this is helpful! You’ve clearly a lot of thought and work into this, and that kind of persistence is rare. Whatever happens with this particular project, the mindset and skills you’re building will carry forward. Wishing you strength and luck as you take the next steps!
Pressuring lab staff sounds like a good idea to me. One concern I have, though, is that the people most likely to leave or speak out may also be the most safety conscious. If they leave individually while everyone else stays, you could end up selecting for the people who are least concerned about the risks. So ideally the pressure would be toward coordinated action, public dissent, or refusal to work on dangerous projects, rather than encouraging concerned people to quit.