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.
Tell me what you want me to do with my life, especially if you can pay me for it.
In general, if you are worried that animal advocacy efforts will soon become irrelevant because the world will change a lot soon, it could make sense to donate to charities that have impact quickly. Shrimp Welfare Project might qualify. But maybe it makes more sense to try to find a way to impact the welfare of animals in the post-AGI world somehow, even though it's really unclear how to do that.
Regarding the cells I28:30, yes you could do that, it would change estimates for cage-free and broiler reforms. If you think these yearly probability that commitments become irrelevant should be higher, I'd be curious for which reason. Possible reasons I listed include x-risks, global catastrophic risks, societal collapse, cultured meat taking over, animals bred not to suffer, black swans.
For context, my choices for "Yearly decrease in probability that commitment is relevant" numbers are informed by this forecast which predicts that the number of chickens slaughtered for meat will be roughly the same in 2052 as it is now, but just 12% of what it is now in 2122. My value for 2122 is slightly lower, 11% because that meticulous question also has this condition: "If humanity goes extinct or ceases to have a developed society prior to a listed year, that sub-question will resolve as Ambiguous." I only decreased the forecast for 2122 slightly because this forecast predicts that the probability of human extinction before 2100 is just 1%, although looking back at this, I think I could've adjusted for x-risks more because much higher estimates of x-risks seem reasonable.
Thank you for an interesting comment.
I'm aware of zdgroff's analysis. In the context of my analysis, I guess it would inform how long the ban of fur farming in Poland might last. But the possibility of fur farming being banned in Poland and then the ban being lifted some years later hadn't even occurred to me. I am much more worried about production moving to other countries to meet the same demand, as this has happened before. I imagine that investors into fur farming would choose to build farms in one of the many countries that allow fur farming, rather than lobby a country like Poland to rescind its ban.
Actually, it is also relevant for a possible EU cage-free ban. I can imagine that ban being rescinded. I don't think this consideration would affect the results of my estimate much, though it does complicate thinking about how many years impact lasts a little bit.
Thanks for working on this. I just want to point out that if a charity helps say one animal per dollar, the real cost for the animal advocacy movement is a bit higher if you account for the following:
Yeah, that doesn't look right. I recommend looking at the spreadsheet rather than the post. I updated some parts of it at some point last year. I see in the spreadsheet that the 5th graph now looks like this
But I don't know if that's still up to date. I haven't been following the progress lately, but many of these broiler commitments are not being implemented, unfortunately.
Interesting points. Starting with 27:45, there are two talks here that claim that AI will probably be bad for farmed animals. @Sam Tucker urges in his talk to work on banning AI in animal farms. There is also discussion on it at 58:27 where Sam says that he is 99% sure that AI in farms will be bad for animals, if I understood him correctly, partly because it might allow factory farming to stay around for longer. Perhaps you should discuss this issue with Sam.
I understand where you're coming from but I wonder whether this would also have negative consequences. Perhaps it would increase the pace of AI development. It would make LLMs more useful, which might increase investments into AI even more. And maybe it would also make LLMs generally smarter, which could also accelerate AI progress (this is not my area, I'm just speculating). Some EA folks are protesting to pause AI, increased progress might not be great. It would help all the research, but not all research makes the world better. For example, it could benefit research into more efficient animal farming, which could be bad for animals. Considerations like these would make me too unsure about the sign of the impact to eagerly support such a cause, unfortunately.
The scribble is indeed very beautiful.
In your graph above, it looks like impact for a lot more than one year. I assume it's something like this:
The red line here is what would've happened without Stop The Farms campaign, and blue line shows that it's different for a little while with the campaign. But I assume that the market soon (like within a year) returns back to the same growth trajectory, and it's as if we never did anything, except that maybe farms are build in a different country. Chicken production is growing and I don't think this will change in the relevant timeframe of few years.