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
TLDR: Former animal advocacy researcher and programmer looking for part-time or contractor work.
Skills & background: generalist research, cost-effectiveness estimates, knowledge about animal advocacy, programming. See my EA forum profile for work examples.
Location/remote: I live in London, can work in an office or remotely, somewhat open to relocating
Availability & type of work: part-time or contractor work. Might be open to a full-time job for an exceptionally good fit. Can start whenever.
Resume/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saulius-%C5%A1im%C4%8Dikas-0867b4a6/
Email/contact: sauliussimcikas@gmail.com
Other notes: I’m interested in animal welfare or longtermist research and some roles in animal advocacy organisations like corporate campaigns manager. Open to other suggestions too if you think I’d be a good fit. Also, tell me if there are things you think I should research or do and I might try to get funding from elsewhere.
I’ll provide some quick thoughts in case no one else answers in a better way.
I don’t know anything about farming in Pakistan in particular, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t the same welfare issues as elsewhere. E.g., egg-laying hens are probably raised in cages which is very bad for them. So by being vegan, you would save tens or hundreds of animals per year from suffering in expectation. It’s particularly important for animal welfare to avoid eating chicken, eggs, some types of fish, and other small animals.
However, you could potentially help millions of animals by becoming an animal advocate. I don’t know about Pakistan in particular, but in most Asian countries animal advocacy movements are very small or non-existent and people who would start such movements and think about cost-effectiveness would be extremely valuable. I see there’s an article about it here.
Also, Our World in Data’s assessment you cite is about fossil emissions. It mostly depends on industries. It doesn’t include cow burps which are a big contributor to climate change. I don’t see much reason to think that choosing a vegan option for a meal in Pakistan would have less impact on climate change than doing it in a Western country. But this is not my area so I don’t know.
Hi Nathalie. Thank you for engaging with my post. I’ll clarify my thinking.
As I clarified here, I do think that humane slaughter reforms for wild-caught fish and invertebrates are promising. This type of work preceded the WAW movement so I didn’t really associate the two.
Also, removing wild animals in large quantities from its environment has severe ripple effects to its environment and all other animals (and humans)
I agree. Also, humans reduce animal populations way more with things like habitat destruction. According to this report, “population sizes of wildlife decreased by 60% globally between 1970 and 2014”. But when it comes to the welfare of animals, I think that these effects are more likely positive. I think (with about 60% confidence) that animals are more likely to experience more suffering than happiness in the wild. Hence, reducing their populations is good for the animals themselves. Yes, it’s bad for humans and causes many other complications. But that’s the concern for the sustainability and environmental protection movements, not the animal advocacy movement which is what WAW is part of.
So if we talk about lives saved, you have a winner in WAW.
I think you are comparing very different things when you say “lives saved”. For farmed animals, you probably mean saving animals from being alive on farms where they suffer a lot. For wild animals, you probably mean allowing animals to be alive and live lives that may or may not involve more suffering than happiness. I think these things are too different for the comparison to work.
Personally, I just care about decreasing suffering and increasing happiness. By the way, I did try to estimate how many hours fish suffer due to fishing processes here. It’s a very incomplete estimate but my impression is that the numbers are much lower than the numbers of farmed animals, although the intensity of suffering is obviously higher. But as I said, I think that wild fish slaughter reforms are worth pursuing.
I hope this is helpful, let me know if you still disagree with any of my points.
This kurzgesagt video argues against anti-natlism in a way that was convincing to me. It says that fewer babies eventually lead to an ageing population where a small number of working-age people have to support a lot of pensioners and that this is already happening. This can cause loads of problems, like poverty and democraticly-elected governments representing pensioners leading to focus on short-term thinking. That does not sound like the kind of population that would deal well with the effects of climate change because it needs massive investment and fresh ideas. It also claims that having fewer children would shrink the population too slowly for climate change because the world population is going to grow for at least 60 more years.
No, sorry, I wasn’t saying that. My manager was Jacob Peacock, he was a great manager. He didn’t put any unwelcome pressure and wasn’t the one who talked to me about the email to OpenPhil. He said that I can publish my WAW articles on behalf of RP but then Marcus disagreed.
It sounds like Rethink stopped Saulius from posting a WAW post (within a work context) and it also looks like there was a potential conflict of interest here for senior staff as posting could affect funding
It is true that I wasn’t allowed to publish some of my WAW work on behalf of RP. Note that this WAW work includes not only the short summary Why I No Longer Prioritize Wild Animal Welfare (which got a lot of upvotes) but also three longer articles that it summarises (this, this, and this). Some of these do not threaten RP’s funding in any way. That said, I was allowed to work on these articles in my work time which should count for something.
Let me give a bit of context because it might not make sense without it. My project was finding the best WAW intervention. I struggled with it a lot. Instead of doing what I was supposed to, I started writing about why I was struggling, which eventually turned into all those posts. I asked my manager (who was quite new to RP) if I could continue working on those posts and publish them on behalf of RP. My manager allowed it. Then Marcus read some of my drafts and gave detailed useful feedback. He said that while he was happy that I looked into this stuff, these articles couldn’t be published on behalf of RP. As I remember it, the reason was that they were basically opinion pieces. He wanted RP to only post stuff that is closer to an academic publication. I asked why but I don’t want to share his answer publicly in case what he told me wasn’t public. I disagreed with his position but it’s the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree on. We both thought that it wasn’t worth trying to bring my articles to the degree of polish (and perhaps rigour) that would meet RP’s publishing standards but that they were still worth publishing. Marcus said that I’m free to finish my posts in my work time, which was very kind of him. Note that this was financially disadvantageous for RP. I felt uncomfortable spending more time on non-RP stuff in my work time so I took an unpaid leave to finish my posts, but it was my own idea and Marcus explicitly told me that I don’t need to do that.
OpenPhil email was sent to my RP email address, so I think that means that I was representing RP
If you do decide to pose a question, I suggest focusing on whether employees at EA organizations feel any direct or indirect pressure to conform to specific opinions due to organizational policies and dynamics, or even due to direct pressure from management. Or just don’t feel free to speak their minds on certain issues related to their job. People should have an option to answer anonymously. Basically to find out if my case was an isolated incident or not.
Thanks Vasco. Personally, I won’t do it. Actually, I pushed this issue here way further than I intended to and I don’t want to talk about it more. I’m afraid that this might be one of those things that might seem like a big deal in theory but is rarely relevant in practice because reality is usually more complicated. And it’s the sort of topic that can be discussed for too long, distracting busy EA executives from their actual work. Many people seem to have read this discussion, so arguments on both sides will likely be considered at RP and some other EA orgs. That is enough for me. I particularly hope it will be discussed by RP’s cause prioritization team.
Thank you for your answer Marcus.
What bothers me is that if I said that I was excited about funding WAW research, no one would have said anything. I was free to say that. But to say that I’m not excited, I have to go through all these hurdles. This introduces a bias because a lot of the time researchers won’t want to go through hurdles and opinions that would indirectly threaten RP’s funding won’t be shared. Hence, funders would have a distorted view of researchers’ opinions.
Put yourself into my shoes. OpenPhil sends an email to multiple people asking for opinions on a WAW grant. What I did was that I wrote a list of pros and cons about funding that grant, recommended funding it, and pressed “send”. It took like 30 minutes. Later OpenPhil said that it helped them to make the decision. Score! I felt energized. I probably had more impact in those 30 minutes than I had in three months of writing about aquatic noise.
Now imagine I knew that I had to inform the management about saying that I’m not excited about WAW. My manager was new to RP, he would’ve needed to escalate to directors. Writing my manager’s manager’s manager a message like “Can I write this thing that threatens the funding of our organisation?” is awkward. Also, these sorts of complex conversations can sometimes take a lot of time for both me and the upper management who are very busy. So I might not have done it. And I’m a very disagreeable employee who knows directors personally, so other researchers are probably less likely to do stuff like that. I also didn’t want to write OpenPhil an email that speaks frankly about the pros of funding the grant but not the cons. So it might have been easier to just ignore OpenPhil’s email and focus on finishing the aquatic noise report.
Maybe all of this is very particular to this situation. Situations like this didn’t arise when I worked at RP very often. I spent most of my time researching stuff where my conclusions had no impact on RP’s funding. But if RP grows, conflicts of interest are likely to arise more often. And such concerns might apply more often to cause-prioritisation research. If a cause prioritisation researcher concluded that say AI safety research is more important than all other causes, would they be able to talk about that freely to funders, even though it would threaten RP’s funding? If not, that’s a problem.
Uh, didn’t expect people to notice this old thread. Just to make the situation sound less dramatic, I should’ve said that I had informed RP that I wanted to quit RP in three months. Then a situation arose after which the person I was supposed to work closely with for those three months didn’t want to work with me. I think that was the main reason why I was asked to resign right away instead of after those three months. It makes sense.
- Jan 1, 2024, 5:41 PM; 166 points) 's comment on Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here’s what we’d do with it. by (
When I was asked to resign from RP, one of the reasons given was that I wrote the sentence “I don’t think that EAs should fund many WAW researchers since I don’t think that WAW is a very promising cause area” in an email to OpenPhil, after OpenPhil asked for my opinion on a WAW (Wild Animal Welfare) grant. I was told that this is not okay because OpenPhil is one of the main funders of RP’s WAW work. That did not make me feel very independent. Though perhaps that was the only instance in the four years I worked at RP.
Because of this instance, I was also concerned when I saw that RP is doing cause prioritization work because I was afraid that you would hesitate to publish stuff that threatens RP funding, and would more willingly publish stuff that would increase RP funding. I haven’t read any of your cause prio research though, so I can’t comment on whether I saw any of that.
EDIT: I should’ve said that this was not the main reason I was asked to resign and that I had said that I would quit in three months before this happened.- Nov 13, 2024, 10:04 PM; 24 points) 's comment on Julia_Wise’s Quick takes by (
- Dec 12, 2023, 12:18 AM; 21 points) 's comment on Rethink Priorities needs your support. Here’s what we’d do with it. by (
It wouldn’t solve the “Aging populations with lower percentages of working age adults threaten developed economies” problem, which I think is low-key one of the biggest problems in the world and the strongest argument to work on aging.
I remember talking about screwworms with @kcudding and @Holly_Elmore, I don’t know how deeply they looked into it but maybe they could comment.
As I understand it, all this data about the impact of events is collected through surveys that are attendees fill immediately after an event. I think that this might introduce some biases. For example, maybe attendees get excited about new connections they made and think that they will collaborate but then never do. If that’s not done already, one way to somewhat mitigate this bias would be to also ask at the annual EA survey about the impact of EA events (that year, and in their lifetime). I wonder if conclusions like the one in this article would hold up.
I have a nitpicky comment that may not be very important in the end.
It seems that estimates of how long cage-free and caged hens live and how many eggs they lay are partially based on Norwood and Lusk 2011. I once did that as well but I was told that the book describes small scale cage-free systems that don’t use optimal genetics. Large scale cage-free systems (which perhaps didn’t exist at the time to the same extent) are likely much more similar to current caged systems, especially after industry will have some time to optimize things. If it was the case that caged hens lay 467 eggs while cage-free eggs lay 325, I would be concerned about the higher number of pullets (hens who are too young to lay eggs) needed to produce the same number of eggs. I see that in your estimates you use a “Length of laying” variable, not a “lifespan” variable. I don’t know if “length of laying” includes the pullet phase, which according to industry breed specification requirements like this lasts about 17 weeks. If it doesn’t include the pullet phase, then you may be implicitly assuming that hens don’t suffer during the pullet phase or something. I failed to understand how exactly your estiamte works so I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what the differences between cage-free and caged actually are. I was told by a vet that cage-free and caged birds have the same lifespan nowadays and saw a few indications that same breeds are used. But I also saw this article that claims that caged hens lay 500 eggs, while cage-free lay 420-430 eggs. I don’t know whom to believe. I can send you an unpublished document where I examined a few more sources but I’m still confused about it.
Anyway, in a way, this stuff doesn’t really matter that much for the estimate. Cage-free reforms may or may not increase the number of hens by say 5% (I’m saying a random number here because I don’t remember. If anyone’s decisions depend on this, I can try to write something about it). But if we use Welfare Footprint’s estimates, then it follows that the switch to cage-free reduces the suffering by like 60%, so that 5% doesn’t have that much impact on the final estimate. The biggest uncertainty is the years of impact. You chose 4 years but you could’ve also chosen 40 years and then everything would’ve been 10 times more cost-effective.
Thank you very much for doing this. However, I’m surprised by the claim that “research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap”. I’ve worked as an animal advocacy researcher in EA orgs for five years and had the title of senior researcher. I am looking for a researcher job right now and I can’t even find anywhere to apply for, at least without a PhD. Well, GiveWell is hiring but I don’t want to work in global health. I was loosely following animal welfare researcher and non-longtermist generalist researcher open jobs at EA orgs this whole year and that was the situation most of the time. I found maybe 7 jobs I could apply for (although I wasn’t genuinely looking for a job until now so I might have missed some). Most of them would’ve required me to compromise on what topics I work for or where I live. In two cases where I talked to people advertising these jobs, I was told that there was a lot of competition (I wasn’t rejected from these jobs so I wasn’t told that as an excuse). For an animal welfare job that required to do cost-effectiveness analyses, people with a background in cost-effectiveness analyses in global health applied. I basically concluded that at least for now, I either need to make up my own topics and apply to EA funds to research them, or to change my career. So I was a bit surprised by this claim. But I don’t want to overstate my surprise, perhaps the situation in global health, mental health, and biosecurity is different.
These were just some very conservative guesses rather than estimates. Also, I think that the effect depends on circumstances:
In the case of eggs and Prop 12, by the time it was passed, most companies in the U.S. had already committed to only use cage-free eggs, often by 2025 or 2026. So I guess you could say that Prop 12 made California do it sooner (2022) and hence sped it up (although it’s unclear if that is even a good thing in itself).[1] But a more important effect of Prop 12 is that it increased the probability that California and the whole U.S. will go cage-free in 2020s, and this is how I might model the impact of Prop 12. That is, I’d probably ask various people about what would they expect future cage-free rates to be with and without Prop 12.
For some other animals, I imagine that there were no corporate commitments or anything? The situation in such cases seems very different.
- ^
According to King (2019b), some producers react to cage-free commitments by building new cage-free facilities, but not destroying old conventional caged houses which don’t yet need to be replaced. This could increase the overall amount of hens (and suffering) in the short term. O’Keefe (2020) claims that between December 2016 and December 2019, “U.S. egg producers added 33.2 million head of cage-free hens, the number of cage-housed hens only declined by 4.3 million head.” Even if the number of caged hens will decline eventually, this trend during the transition period is worrying.
Nice post. It reminds me that I want to consider this option. By the way, someone once tried to very roughly estimate the cost-effectiveness of volunteering at a suicide hotline here.
Thanks for the post, it’s an interesting idea. I slightly worry about corruption in “unannounced animal welfare audits by accredited and independent third parties”. Someone told me years ago that such audits by government agents in Lithuania were a farce. Do you know if such audits work well in practice? One way I see it working is if the auditor is an animal advocate. Is that what tends to happen in practice?