saulius

6063 karmaJoined Bow 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
433

Topic contributions
5

Good points :) You might be interested in this sequence (see the links at the bottom of the summary)

Please don't treat cost-effectiveness estimates as such an exact science. There are so many subjective choices you make in them. For example, you could say that cage-free campaigns speed up changes by 5 years, or 50 years. Both choices are defensible but the result will be 10 times different just based on this choice alone. 

It's impossible to tell without seeing the THL's estimate, but they probably were conservative when estimating their cost-effectiveness. It's what I would do if I was doing such estimate for THL. $2.63 per hen impacted is already high enough for most people to want to donate. Maybe it's even better because it's more believable. And if they make it less conservative, someone might criticize them. In any case, THL took down the $2.63 estimate, so that's a strong reason not to treat it seriously.

Do you have to live in the U.S. (or even in a swing state) to do something useful?

thanks but in this case there are other reasons why I need to use the laptop and make people I meet and survey to look at my laptop. I guess I mostly want to gaze how big of a deal people think covid is nowadays.

EAG and covid [edit: solved, I'm not attending the EAG (I'm still testing positive as of Saturday)]

I have many meetings planned for the EAG London that starts tomorrow but I’m currently testing very faintly positive for covid. I feel totally good. I’m looking for a bit of advice on what to do. I only care to do what’s best for altruistic impact. Some of my meetings are important for my current project and trying to schedule them online would delay and complicate some things a little bit. I will also need to use my laptop during meetings to take notes. I first tested positive on Monday evening, and since then all my tests were very faintly positive. No symptoms. I guess my options are roughly:

  1. Attend the conference as normal, wear a mask when it’s not inconvenient and when I’m around many people.
  2. Only go to 1-1s, wear a mask when I have to be inside but perhaps not during 1-1s (I find prolonged talking with a mask difficult)
  3. Don’t go inside, have all of my 1-1s outside. Looking at google maps, there doesn’t seem to be any benches or nice places to sit just outside the venue, so I might have to ask people to sit on the floor and to use my laptop on the floor, and I don’t know how I’d charge it. Perhaps it’s better not to go if I’d have to do that.
  4. Don't go. I don't mind doing that if that's the best thing altruistically.

In all cases, I can inform all my 1-1s (I have ~18 tentatively planned) that I have covid. I can also attend only if I test negative in the morning of a day.

This would be the third EAG London in a row where I’d cancel all my meetings last minute because I might be contagious with covid, although I’m probably not and I feel totally good. This makes me a bit frustrated and biased, which is partly why I’m asking for advice here. The thing is that I think that very few people are still that careful and still test but perhaps they should be, I don’t know. There are vulnerable people and long covid can be really bad. So if I’m going to take precautions, I’d like others reading this to also test and do the same, at least if you have a reason to believe you might have covid.

It’s also useful to ask yourself why you want to write in the first place. I personally think that there are too many people whose plan to help the world is to write on the EA forum and that a lot of effort spent on writing for the EA forum would be better spent on doing more direct forms of altruism. I sometimes find that I fool myself that I’m doing something effective just because I’m spending time on the EA forum. It can be useful for some niche careers, but it depends.

Answer by saulius6
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This is how I felt when I first tried to write for the EA forum. In order to know what kind of text is needed, and what would be new in the topic you are writing about, you kind of need to know everything that was already written and what sort of stuff would influence decision-makers. It’s impossible to know all that for someone new to the space. This is why I think it’s useful for senior people to suggest very concrete topics to junior researchers and then to guide them. And especially for the first few articles, the more specific the topic, the better. I think this article has more advice like that.

I like making a distinction between superficial beliefs and deeply held beliefs which are often entirely subconscious. You have a superficial belief that Starcraft is balanced but a deeply held belief that your faction is the weakest. 

For another example, my dad lived all his life in a world where alcohol was socially acceptable, while everyone agreed that all other drugs were the worst thing ever, quickly leading to addiction, etc. He once even remarked how if alcohol was invented today, it would surely be illegal because it has so many negative consequences, even compared to some other drugs. But it’s just a funny thought to him. He offers me a drink whenever I come to visit him, but he got immediately very concerned when I mentioned that I’ve tried cannabis. He can’t just suddenly rewire his brain to change the associations he has with something like cannabis. Even if I tell him about some studies about cannabis not being that harmful, especially when used rarely, in his subconsciousness, there might barely be a difference between cannabis and drugs like heroin. Maybe he could rewire his subconscious reaction by going through all his memories where he was told something bad about drugs and reinterpreting them in the face of the new evidence. But ain’t nobody has time for that. 

Well, it’s worth trying to rewire yourself about deeply held beliefs that really harm you like “I am unlovable”, "I don't deserve happiness", "I can't trust anyone", etc. This is a big part of what therapy does, I think. But for most topics like Starcraft factions, we just have to accept that there will always be a mismatch between superficial beliefs and deeply held beliefs.

A lot of these arguments apply for wild animals but not so much for farmed.

Even if most humans die young if they lose the ability to feel pain, that is not true for Jo Cameron. And the idea of some people thinking about this is to just modify the mutated gene she has in others. I asked GPT-4 and it says that other animals have that gene too.

But it's not such a big issue if farmed animals injure themselves or die young because they injure themselves. I imagine that injuries are mostly bad because of pain. Higher pre-slaughter mortality would make it less profitable but farmers might find ways to prevent them from dying young or meat prices could be higher.

Regarding "10 million species": most of the impact would be from doing this for the few species that are farmed in very large numbers like chickens and whiteleg shrimp

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