saulius

5833 karmaJoined Dec 2015Bow Rd, London E3, UK

Bio

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.

Personal feedback form: https://forms.gle/3QBCJ3wsJnjPPWqF6 It can be anonymous. I especially welcome negative feedback.

How others can help me

Tell me what you want me to do with my life, especially if you can pay me for it.

Comments
415

Topic contributions
5

Nice ^_^ One final thought. I mentioned that scale depends on multiple parameters:

  1. Current human population
  2. Expected growth in the human population
  3. Current animal production per capita
  4. Expected change in the production per capita

You account for 2,3, and 4 with a separate variable “expected growth in animal production” which would be something like “projected number of farmed animals in 2050 divided by the current number of farmed animals”. And then also have a variable “Current human population”. I think it makes sense to split because these two variables matter for different reasons, and someone may put weight on one but not the other.

Also, yes, I very much had the same dilemma years ago. Mine went something like this:

Heart: I figured it out! All I care about is reducing suffering and increasing happiness!

Brain: Great! I've just read a lot of blogs and it turns out that we can maximise that by turning everything into a homogenous substance of hedonium, including you, your mom, your girlfriend, the cast of Friends, all the great artworks and wonders of nature. When shall we start working on that?

Heart: Ummm, a small part of me think that'd be great but... I'm starting to think that maybe happiness and suffering is not ALL I care about, maybe it's a bit more complex. Is it ok if we don't turn my mom into hedonium?

My point is, in the end, you think that suffering is bad and happiness is good because your emotions say so (what other reason could there be?). Why not listen to other things your emotions tell you? Ugh, sorry if I’m repeating myself.

You don’t seem to apply your reasoning that our current values might be “extremely sub-optimal” to your values of hedonium/EA/utilitarianism. But I think there are good reasons to believe they might be very sub-optimal. Firstly, most people (right now and throughout history) would be terrified of everything they care about being destroyed and replaced with hedonium. Secondly, even you say that it “doesn’t make me feel good and it is in direct opposition to most of my values”, despite being one of the few proponents of a hedonium shockwave. I’m unsure why you are identifying with the utilitarian part of you so strongly and ignoring all the other parts of you.


Anyway, I won’t expand because this topic has been discussed a lot before and I’m unlikely to say anything new. The first place that comes to mind is Complexity of Value - LessWrong

and if you are in Europe, CARE conference is great. I think people can get up to speed very fast at such conferences. They can seem scary when you don't know anyone there but I think animal advocates are generally friendly and welcoming to newcomers :)

I see. My personal intuition is that it wouldn't convince many people. I mean, cooked food includes cooked meat. So, unfortunately, their argument that we have evolved to have meat in our diets still stands.

I'm afraid I'm failing to connect the dots. How do you see this being related to veganism, and how do you see researching this making an impact?

Also, perhaps it's a bit weird to use it as a benchmark because it's the consumers who pay most of the cost for chicken welfare reforms (and, to a lesser extent, farmers, retailers, and sometimes governments). So the comparison with something like AMF is not very clean. Corporate campaigns are a bit more similar to lobbying governments to distribute bednets. Ugh, I notice that I'm a bit confused about this right now.

I'd say there's about 30% probability I will do it in the next two years. I've just started a project for Open Philanthropy about estimating what should be the speed-up values in cost-effectiveness estimates for corporate and legislative welfare reforms, as that is the most uncertain aspect of these estimates. Open Philanthropy is the main target audience for this type of stuff and I don't think that putting the rest of the numbers together for a cost-effectiveness estimate would influence them much. I'm unsure if another cost-effectiveness estimate is what's needed to finally attract other large-scale donors to fund welfare reforms. People who care about cost-effectiveness have gotten the message I think. A new estimate would probably output a similar number because reforms have probably gotten less effective, but I now think that I underestimated cost-effectiveness in this report.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Some thoughts.

 As long as we don't have an indication that it is significantly less likely to be successful in higher-population countries, it seems fair to focus on the factor that we know will be important: the expected impact, if successful.

Lobbying smaller bodies of government is definitely easier. Whoever decides on policies in small countries has fewer bids of attention and is targeted by fewer lobbyists. You might need a lot of connections and effort to make your voice heard to a decision-maker in a big body of government. In a  small body of government, you might be able to set up a meeting by writing an email without any prior connection. There’s definitely a trade-off of scale vs tractability here. And to me, it’s not obvious at all which choice would be more cost-effecitve. I'm not talking from experience here, it's just my common sense intuitions.

 If we can get a successful model to work for some part of a large country, there is the potential to scale this much further or to have it scale automatically across the country (e.g. word of mouth).

I agree that country borders impact word of mouth but I’m not sure how much. Especially in Africa since I’ve heard that African borders were drawn kind of randomly and I don’t know how important they are culturally. For example, if I look at Africa language map like this, I see that bigger countries have many languages. Language barriers might limit the meme spread within the country. And it also seems that languages often cross national boundaries,  Meme spread through internet content, TV, and radio might often transcend national boundaries, I imagine. But I don’t know how much, I know little about Africa.

It’s just food for thought, I think your view is reasonable and you probably have already thought about these things. You could just reduce the weight of the variable a little bit if I convinced you a little bit :)

I relate to that a lot, and I want to share how I resolved some of this tension. You currently allow your heart to only say “I want to reduce suffering and increase happiness” and then your brain takes over and optimizes, ignoring everything else your heart is saying. But it’s an arbitrary choice to only listen to the most abstract version of what the heart is saying. You could also allow your heart to be more specific like “I want to help all the animals!”, or even “I want to help this specific animal!” and then let your brain figure out the best way to do that. The way I see it, there is no objectively correct choice here. So I alternate on how specific I allow my heart to be. 

In practice, it can look like splitting your donations between charities that give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, and charities that seem most cost-effective when you coldly calculate, as advised in Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons SeparatelyHere is an example of someone doing this. Unfortunately, it can be much more difficult to do this when you contribute with work rather than donations.

Load more