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.