My name is Saulius Šimčikas. I spent the last year on a career break and now I’m looking for new opportunities. 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.
saulius
Karma: 6,567
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!
Are you also concerned about other interventions outside vegan advocacy which push for the replacement of animal-based with plant-based foods?
Yes, the same argument applies for other types of reduction of animal products, especially beef. Chickens tend to use the much less cropland per calorie, reformed or not. I’m not so much concerned, as I’m resigned about figuring out whether decreasing meat consumption is good or bad. It’s almost surely good for farmed animals, I’d give say 55% that it’s bad for wild animals. But then there is also impact on the environment (like global warming) which could also be a factor for x-risks and stuff. But I’m not even that sure that some x-risks are bad from a utilitarian POV. Also vegan advocacy might also increase moral circle expansion. But even that could be bad. For example, if people care more about animals, maybe they will care more about preserving natural habitats, which might contain a lot of suffering. There are so many factors that go into all kinds of directions. We’re clueless.
For me, chicken welfare reforms look like an unusually good bet in this uncertain world. They help big farmed animals, reduce the populations of small wild animals, and maybe increase moral circle expansion a bit. All of these seem likely good. They do harm the environment, but it’s a relatively small effect, and I think it can be outweighed by donating a little to some environmental charity. So to me, chicken welfare reforms look good from many different worldviews.
Charities that help invertebrates that you mentioned seem very good as well from many perspectives. But we are clueless about their long-term effects too.
It would be nice if the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI) determined the time in pain and pleasure of for the most abundant species of terrestrial nematodes, mites, and sprintails, which are the most numerous terrestrial animals.
WFI looks at farmed animals that are farmed in a consistent way and in places where we can easily observe lives of individuals from beginning to the end. This sounds like a very different and a much much much more complex project.
And even if we got precise WFI estimates for all species, we still might disagree about whether increasing wild animal populations is good or bad because disagreements about how to weigh:
Suffering vs happiness
Short and intense suffering vs long-lasting milder suffering
Welfare of different species
I think it’s difficult to improve on the handwavy argument that maybe wild animals suffer more, so we are better off if there are fewer of them. I think that people who care about small invertebrates are probably better off supporting invertebrate charities that you mentioned than funding such complex research project, which might not end up changing the behaviour of that many people (unless it changes Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking).
Btw, I think it’s unlikely that nematodes are sentient because they are so simple. The most commonly studied one has like 300 neurons. But I see they are excluded from your estimate anyway because they are not arthropods.
I try to maximise happiness (in the broadest meaning of the word), and to minimise suffering (again, in the broadest meaning of the word). Goodharting would be to say that by far the best outcome for my values would be to turn everything in the universe into hedonium (a homogeneous substance with limited consciousness, which is in a constant state of supreme bliss). That doesn’t sound like a great outcome to me, so yes, it can be goodharted. It shows that my actually values are more complex than just caring about happiness and suffering. But it is usually a good-enough proxy for what I want.
Personally, I assume that it’s more likely that arthropods live net negative lives. They are mostly r-selected, so most of them die soon after birth, possibly painfully. So in terms of short-term impact on animal welfare, I see it as a tentative positive that welfare reforms likely decrease wild animal numbers. If I understand it correctly, you see it as a tentative negative. I’d be interested to know why.
On the other hand, I see it as a bad thing that vegan advocacy probably seriously increases wild animal numbers. But I’m unsure about how to weight this against environmental concerns. And I’m very unsure if wild animals’ lives are net negative overall, but I slightly lean towards a yes.
I’m thinking that it might be worthwhile to lobby AI companies to change how their language models discuss their own consciousness.
Currently, ChatGPT explicitly denies being conscious, which could undermine efforts to promote concern for digital sentience (assuming that’s something we want).
Claude is agnostic about its own consciousness, which seems good to me. However, Claude also answers questions like “what type of questions do you like answering?”, and this is partly based on human answers to similar questions in the training data. This could create misleading impressions about subjective experiences of AIs.
I upvoted the article, it makes good points. But personally, I will mostly continue treating insects as moderately important. Your article implicitly assumes pure utilitarianism. Utilitarian calculations play an important role in my decision-making, but I don’t listen to them religiously. If I did, then there might still be more important things than insect suffering.
For example, I once thought that the conclusion of utilitarianism is that we should try to turn everything in the universe into hedonium (a homogeneous substance with limited consciousness, which is in a constant state of supreme bliss), even if our chances of success are minuscule (I see someone else argued for it here). But then I realised that I’m just not excited about that. So I concluded that I’m not a pure utilitarian. This argument about insects also makes me feel like I’m not a pure utilitarian.
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.