Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 12,909

Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.

I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.

Want to leave anonymous feedback for me, positive, constructive or negative? https://www.admonymous.co/michael-st-jules

Michael St Jules 🔸 6 Jun 2026 17:06 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Yes, we could just remove it if we thought it was net negative overall.
Cage-free could turn out to be one of the best things we can do to reduce disabling pain, but slightly bad for excruciating pain, so that it’s just unclear whether it’s net good or bad under wide uncertainty about pain intensity tradeoffs. If it looks very good on views where disabling-excruciating pain tradeoffs are more modest and only somewhat bad and in the end outweighed on views with much more weight to excruciating pain, removing it from the portfolio could be a mistake.
See also my related post Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty.

Michael St Jules 🔸 6 Jun 2026 16:42 UTC
8 points
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in reply to: Aidan Alexander’s comment on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Suppose cage-free increases excruciating pain compared to caged.
Is the total increase in excruciating pain across all (the sum total of) cage-free work from our community smaller than the total reduction in excruciating pain from all of our other work, e.g. CO2 stunning for chickens, other humane slaughter work, other welfare work, across species?
If yes, and if there are no other increases in excruciating pain (or they’re small enough), then we could still say our community is preventing more excruciating pain than it’s causing, overall. Our portfolio could still be robustly positive across different views on pain intensity tradeoffs. I think I’d be pretty satisfied with that, even if it is causing some excruciating pain (that is outweighed by reductions).
(Alternatively, we could try to compensate the specific animals we expect to cause more excruciating pain to, but that seems much harder on worldviews according to which excruciating pain matters way more than disabling pain.)

Michael St Jules 🔸 6 Jun 2026 13:17 UTC
17 points
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on: animal welfare has an evidence problem
Thanks for writing this! I’m generally supportive of more critical review of evidence and analyses like this and would like to see more of it done, as well as more/better data collection, as you point to. I’m also glad you’re working on new shrimp stunners and better validating them.
Re cage-free vs caged systems
My sense is that it’s reasonable to infer that in the long-run, we don’t know whether mortality rates are higher in caged or cage-free systems, and that the differences in average mortality rates are “small”, based just on the graphs in this post and WFI’s meta-analysis to which this post refers.
I agree that it’s “an overstatement to say that there is “no differences in mortality” given the actual data” (in recent years, reading the graphs here).
I think it’s still reasonable to treat them as if there’s no expected difference in mortality rates in the long-run, but I also think it’s reasonable to disagree with that, and this is a potentially important and fairly subjective judgement call, so should be flagged pretty explicitly. It could also mask differences in causes of mortality and associated harms by system, like the kind you point out, which could be important.
Cynthia Schuck-Paim from Welfare Footprint cited more US and EU data here, which show a very small difference in average mortality rates (3.75 in cage-free vs 3.64 in caged), much smaller than the standard deviation in mortality rates (2.62 and 2.34). I don’t know what the “Standard” column in the table means, though. (Thanks to @mvolz for flagging WFI’s responses.)
On the other hand, this could still allow that mortality rates increase substantially for several years as farms transition, and that might be quite bad, both in potentially extremely painful deaths and in indicating higher prevalences of other causes of suffering. I think it’s worth being upfront about that, because there could be reasonable disagreement about whether it’s worth it for the benefits of cage-free.
I think one trouble here is that WFI has to make a large number of judgement calls, given the available evidence. I think they are pretty transparent about them, but there can be a lot to check.
Some questions I have are:
1. If mortality rates between the systems do roughly converge on average in the long-run, but start higher early in the transition to cage-free, how long does the ~convergence take in practice across geographies, including in the Global South, especially for our marginal cage-free work now?
2. WFI’s currently published analysis estimates generally less expected suffering in cage-free systems across pain intensity categories. At what point in the transition period to cage-free are these estimates based on, what mortality rates do they reflect, and how representative would they be of transitions across geographies? @cynthiaschuck @Wladimir J. Alonso
3. How much do increased egg costs and the resulting reduced egg demand mitigate the potential harms of cage-free transitions? Could the reduction in number outweigh any potential increases in harms on average per hen?
4. (May be answered by 2 or 3.) Are we, on net, increasing or decreasing excruciating pain with cage-free transitions in expectation?
  1. Are we just counterfactually moving forward these potentially painful cage-free transitions, if and because industry would (be forced to shift) eventually anyway, and so reaping the benefits earlier? Would egg replacements and other alt proteins or a global catastrophe (e.g. from TAI) mean we don’t get to reap the benefits after mortality rates would have converged?
  2. Does our other work focused on excruciating pain (e.g. humane chicken slaughter) make up for potentially more excruciating pain in cage-free systems?
  3. How are we making tradeoffs between excruciating and disabling pain? How should we make them? (Personally, I’m averse to increasing excruciating pain overall in my portfolio, with high uncertainty about how much worse it is than disabling pain, and would probably have a part of my portfolio dedicated to preventing excruciating pain.)
5. Does nest deprivation really cause (so much) disabling pain? The supporting evidence I’ve seen seems somewhat confounded, and I would assign a lower probability to disabling pain than in WFI’s published analysis, but would guess there’s still a decent chance of it. (I expect WFI to have updated estimates in their upcoming book.)

Michael St Jules 🔸 5 Jun 2026 13:49 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Kaleem’s comment on: Kaleem’s Shortform
Ah, influencing certifiers sounds interesting, would love to take a look at the paper! :)
Also looking forward to your survey when it’s ready!
I’ve been curious lately about Muslims’ attitudes towards stunning and slaughter practices, and especially what kinds of stunning would be acceptable, in case we wanted to promote more stunning or even do more R&D for halal stunning.

Michael St Jules 🔸 2 Jun 2026 21:19 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Kaleem’s comment on: Kaleem’s Shortform
Any updates on this, or promising interventions?

Michael St Jules 🔸 2 Jun 2026 0:14 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
In your model and your answers here, just replace inaction with campaign and campaign with inaction.

Michael St Jules 🔸 1 Jun 2026 16:26 UTC
12 points
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in reply to: Buck’s comment on: My disagreements with CEA’s approach to stewarding EA
Do you think this is AI safety-specific, because LessWrong pulls the people who have engaged most deeply with AI safety, and so the EA Forum is left primarily with people who aren’t as into or understand arguments around AI safety?
Or, do you think this is generally bad across causes, and the EA Forum is net negative for other causes, too?

Michael St Jules 🔸 30 May 2026 9:13 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
No, I don’t think this is the right way to model this. This looks a lot like the typical error people make for the original two envelopes problem.
1. Initial welfare (what does that mean?) and final welfare after inaction can differ, because the world, e.g. land use, will change even if you do nothing, and campaigns take time for their effects to materialize.
2. If you swapped the roles of campaign and inaction, you would flip the conclusion, too.

Michael St Jules 🔸 29 May 2026 21:55 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
It was illustrative.
Inaction also does not in fact lead to welfare of 0 with probability 100%. There will be lots of animals suffering and many possible outcomes if we do nothing. So it’s not correct to assume total welfare of 0.

Michael St Jules 🔸 29 May 2026 8:53 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
If you instead set the campaign option to 0 welfare and defined the welfare of the world with inaction relative to the campaign option, you’d end up with the opposite conclusion, that only inaction reaches −1.
Avoiding the worst is meant to treat each option symmetrically. It doesn’t depend (in theory) on which option you single out to define things relative to.
(RP’s practical procedure does start with inaction, but if you end up with the same probability distributions for each option in the end, the results will be the same as if you started with a different option to define all distributions relative to. I think their procedure helps ensure consistent probability assignments and is less work, compared to directly estimating each distribution independently.)

Michael St Jules 🔸 28 May 2026 20:56 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Imagine the world has welfare 0.
With inaction, the final welfare will be 0 with probability 100 %.
This is exactly a procedure you could follow for difference-making risk aversion; it’s equivalent to taking the statewise difference with inaction. The welfare of the world with inaction isn’t 0 with probability 100%.
RP has a model/procedure for avoiding the worst risk aversion here.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 May 2026 10:45 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Ah, sorry, I was too quick and should have read more carefully.
However, I believe the distribution with the campaigns has longer positive and negative tails
Why do you believe this?
As chicken and egg prices increase from these welfare reforms, I would expect:
1. some shifts between crops and nature (including through substitution), but I’m clueless about which involves more suffering, so this doesn’t clearly favour one or the other.
2. substitution towards beef and other pasture products, which reduces invertebrate populations substantially, and probably without making lives much worse. This would mean less suffering and so do better in the worst case.

Michael St Jules 🔸 26 May 2026 17:54 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
I agree. So the worst case is that the campaigns cause lots of suffering (relative to inaction)?
I don’t think this is right. I think you’re still treating “Avoiding the worst” like a difference-making view. You shouldn’t be thinking in terms of “relative to inaction”, which itself has a highly uncertain distribution of outcomes. Just evaluate the distribution of outcomes for each option, without fixing any as a comparison option.
The question is only whether worst-case outcomes are more or less likely with action or inaction.
FWIW, the actual worst cases are s-risks, and I’d expect “Avoiding the worst” views to prioritize their mitigation, as long as we’re not clueless about that.

Michael St Jules 🔸 26 May 2026 3:23 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Interventions which cost-effectively increase the welfare of vertebrates will change land use much more than inaction, and a greater change in land use increases the probability of causing lots of suffering?
It might cause lots of suffering, but it could also prevent lots of suffering, too. I think you’re thinking in terms of difference-making, but “Avoiding the worst” risk aversion is not difference-making. Rather than thinking about what you cause, you should just look at both (distributions of) outcomes and ask which has more suffering in it, without privileging the results of inaction.
Unless you believe the expected amount of wild animal suffering is higher all-things-considered than with inaction, you shouldn’t really expect it to do worse according to “Avoiding the worst” risk aversion (as a heuristic; there could be exceptions).

Michael St Jules 🔸 25 May 2026 17:14 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
I don’t think welfare interventions targeting vertebrates will necessarily look worse than doing nothing on “Avoiding the worst” views, because they don’t specifically, AFAIK, increase the risks of worse cases than inaction. I think things that reduce land use for agriculture, including a lot of alt protein and veg advocacy work, plausibly do look bad in the near-term on “Avoiding the worst” views, because the near-term worst cases are where invertebrates have bad lives, modest/high moral weights and larger populations.
But I do think on many difference-making views that compare to some default option like inaction and weigh downsides at least linearly and more than upsides, most interventions will look worse than the default.
I also have a similar comment here and a piece critiquing and exploring different versions of difference-making more generally here. A version of difference-making that wouldn’t let invertebrates dominate would be one that discounts both more extreme upsides and more extreme downsides (especially symmetrically) relative to a comparison option (more).

Michael St Jules 🔸 15 May 2026 0:12 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Socrates’s comment on: Technoliberal’s Quick takes
I agree with Craig here. I’ve written about problems with most conceptions of utility people use and describe alternatives that I think better match what Craig is saying in this sequence.

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 May 2026 7:33 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Teo Ajantaival’s comment on: Notes on equanimity from the inside
Hmm, the view in my sequence Radical empathy is consequentialist-compatible and judgemental, but is designed to judge exactly as others judge, on their behalf.

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 May 2026 6:20 UTC
5 points
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on: Notes on equanimity from the inside
Where bliss or joy shout “more please,” equanimity has a subtle draw that made me go on retreat a second time but didn’t have me cling to it.
Interestingly, I think the “more please” or craving is dissociable from pleasure, even if not in typical cases. From my piece Pleasure and suffering are not conceptual opposites:
Pleasure and unpleasantness need not involve desire, at least conceptually, and it seems pleasure at least does not require desire in humans. Desire, as motivational salience, depends on brain mechanisms in animals distinct from those for pleasure, and which can be separately manipulated (Berridge, 2018, Nguyen et al., 2021, Berridge & Dayan, 2021), including by reducing desire (incentive salience) without also reducing drug-induced euphoria (Leyton et al., 2007, Brauer & H De Wit, 1997). Berridge and Kringelbach (2015) summarize the last two studies as follows:
human subjective ratings of drug pleasure (e.g., cocaine) are not reduced by pharmacological disruption of dopamine systems, even when dopamine suppression does reduce wanting ratings (Brauer and De Wit, 1997, Leyton et al., 2007)
On the other hand, in humans and other animals, the aversive salience of physical pain may not be empirically separable from its unpleasantness (Shriver, 2014), but as far as I can tell, the issue is not settled.

Michael St Jules 🔸 25 Apr 2026 18:37 UTC
3 points
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on: AI safety can be a Pascal’s mugging even if p(doom) is high
The first group of people are wrong because the probability that you personally avert AI catastrophe isn’t that small.
What do you estimate it to be, given all of the other actors in the space focused on this binary outcome?
Also, how high should the probability difference be for you to think devoting your career to it makes sense, rather than taking minimal precautions with low opportunity costs, like how we think about seatbelts and insurance against very unlikely events?

Michael St Jules 🔸 21 Apr 2026 22:21 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Derek Shiller’s comment on: Discussions of (p)sentience of small animals miss the point
I’m more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare, on which something like relative functional significance determines welfare levels. E.g. something’s attention-grabbing capacity helps to determine its welfare significance. In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans.
One possibility for attention-grabbing: beings’ welfare ranges may be proportional to how much attention they have to grab, and beings with richer/more detailed experiences could have more units of attention to be grabbed, with an analogy between the number of details in a visual field like the number of pixels in a computer screen. That being said, I’m not sure it’s any less valid for it to be independent of the number of possible separate elements in conscious attention at a time, and I suspect it’s just a matter of normative interpretation, not a matter of empirical fact.
I also think there are degrees to which something is an attentional mechanism at all or has a given functional role, that could have normative significance, and it’s unlikely that there’s an objective fact of the matter about how we should weigh these degrees. See my piece Gradations of moral weight, basically another two envelopes problem.