Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 13,064

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 🔸 28 Jul 2026 16:00 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
One could argue there is a probability above exactly 0 of any given quantity being a probabilistic mixture involving a distribution with infinite or undefined expected value. In this case, all distributions would have an infinite or undefined expected value? For me this is a bitter bullet to bite than fully rejecting distributions with infinite or undefined expected value.
I think you should just expect this, and the answer is not to deny the possibility of St Petersberg lotteries in objective quantities, but to figure out a good way to deal with them (e.g. ignore small enough probabilities, use a bounded utility function, use commitments, use bracketing of some form), or accept that they raise difficult normative problems.
Do you see any undesirable implications of believing in ghosts which have exactly 0 measurable effects on the world? I think this is effectively the same as not believing in such ghosts.
Are you saying you believe in the existence with 100% credence in anything (such as ghosts) that is not ruled out by current evidence, as long as its effects couid be arbitrarily small and are so far indistinguishable from its nonexistence? Or must it also have no important normative implications (under classical utilitarianism?)?
Ghosts could be conscious, experience pleasure and suffering and care about what you do. Some could be vengeful and want harm to fall upon those that have caused them harm in their lives (whether or not they enact it themselves). Others could want to see the happiness of loved ones. Others could want their descendants to live up to their expectations (e.g. in education, work, family, religious adherence), and not care much about their happiness. A large share could be horrified by modern secularism. It could be that every human that dies becomes a ghost indefinitely.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 Jul 2026 17:50 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
What do you think about the St Petersburg problem now?
I think your arguments re infinities conflict with Occam’s razor, and the principle of indifference should be applied across models within the same complexity (or submodels), otherwise you will assign 0 or too little credence to simpler models that are special cases, e.g. parameter value=0 or effectively eliminating some type of feature. There are infinitely many ways the universe could be more complex, and arbitrarily more complex, than you’d guess.
A flat universe effectively has one fewer parameter and is simpler. So it shouldn’t get 0 credence. Among flat universes, the bounded/finite ones also have extra parameters for the boundaries or shape of the universe (compared to something that looks like R^3), so the infinite one shouldn’t get 0 credence.
(There probably are many ways for the universe to be infinite spatially in its shape, too, but those are more complex than R^3.)
EDIT:
As an aside, there have been many cases where quantities in physics were assumed to be 0, but then turned out to be just small values, like the mass of neutrinos. It often makes sense to round a quantity to 0 for simplicity, but a sufficiently small value would explain exactly the same empirical evidence.
Note that I never suggested to assign 0 probability to anything. I think this leads to further examples to illustrate my point:
Would you assign exactly 0 probability to photons having exactly 0 mass?
Exactly 0 probability to there being no additional fundamental force, because it could just be vanishingly weak? And shouldn’t this get you to infinitely many fundamental forces? For any finite set of fundamental forces, you could posit another one and just say it’s very weak.
Exactly 0 probability to there not being ghosts, because their effects could just be very small or rare?
I think consistently applying your arguments suggest you should assign 0 probability in these cases, and so your models blow up in complexity and you become too credulous, contrary to Occam’s razor.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 Jul 2026 4:05 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
I like the principle of indifference. However, I think infinities are unfalsifiable in principle. In this case, does it make sense for me to attribute probabilities to them? If I did, they would be just metaphysical priors that can never be updated by any evidence.
St Petersburg-like lotteries, defined in terms of your Bayesian credences, don’t require assigning positive probability to any possible infinities out there in the world.
I’ll leave the rest in a footnote, because it’s not that relevant to the point I’ve been making so don’t plan to go further with it, but I already wrote it and it may be of interest to you.^[1]
1. ^
  I think falsifiability for a Bayesian could just mean we can imagine evidence that would warrant assigning very very low credences to the hypothesis. Actual infinities are often falsifiable in principle in this way, in specific cases. I think the probability you should assign to you being infinite in spatial size is extremely small. Similarly for the Earth being infinite in size.
  In the case of the spatial extent of the universe being infinite, it seems hard to falsify now only because all the evidence we’ve gathered so far is in fact consistent with it (or no less consistent than with a bounded/finite universe), and it remains one of the standard models used by experts. My own view is that it’s more likely than not infinite in spatial extent, because it’s the simplest model consistent with the evidence.
  I think our credences that the universe is infinite in spatial extent should increase with our credences that the universe is globally flat (0 global curvature), which has been measurable. If we had good evidence of nonzero global curvature, that would be decent (but not overwhelming) evidence that the universe is finite/bounded, because it would rule out the most plausible infinite models of the universe.
  I agree that we can sometimes compare actions with infinite expected cost-effectiveness. I’m most partial to expansionist views of some kind, as the most complete (given precise probabilities).

Michael St Jules 🔸 23 Jul 2026 16:57 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
I object to relying on infinities (not arbitrarily large finities) to guide decisions because they do not explain more empirical evidence than arbitrarily large finities.
But do they deserve to be privileged at the exclusion of the infinite EV distributions if and when the latter are at least as consistent with the evidence? Why? Shouldn’t you use some principle of indifference or symmetry here?
If there’s no finite upper bound on what the value the specific probability distribution can take, how can you be 100% confident it is not a probabilistic mixture with a distribution with infinite or undefined EV (but finite for every actual value), like 0.0001% probability to it being drawn from something like a St. Petersburg lottery?

Michael St Jules 🔸 22 Jul 2026 18:25 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
The expected value of the St. Petersburg lottery is 1 + 1 + … = +inf. It involves finite terms, but infinitely many terms. I meant to relate f(x) = x in my comment to the expected value of the St. Petersburg lottery. If this involved an arbitrarily large number of terms, its expected value would be arbitrarily large, but not infinite.
I don’t understand what you’re objecting to. Are you saying all probability distributions should only take finitely many possible values? If so, do you have an upper bound on what the total value should be over all of the future and possible existence, that you’re 100% confident in, under your course of action if where you do nothing? (It doesn’t have to be the least upper bound / tight.)

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 17:29 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Below is how Claude thinks Adam (the author of the article) would object to your comments. The objections make sense to me. Any reactions?
Claude is dumb (at least without further critique and verification, and usually with), and your prompt basically put it on the task of defending the position, not actually assessing the arguments fairly. So it turned up bad arguments.
I doubt the author would respond this badly.

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 16:06 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Taking bet A doesn’t require any commitment. My argument just uses backward induction (+ignoring statewise incomparability), which you should generally use in sequential choice situations, or else you’ll be worse off in many situations, even with sharp probabilities.
It allows unsharpness. Having unsharp probabilities does not require sequential decisions to be made independently.
that very concession is what Elga reads as victory: the imprecision has stopped doing the one thing it was introduced to do.
The argument against unsharp probabilities is defeated. We just have to treat them in certain ways. The summary of the paper here missed one way we could treat them, and claimed too much against another (if we accept commitments or resolute choice in other cases).

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 16:03 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Solution to which problem? I am not sure what is supposed to be problematic.
That if you use backward induction on acting rationally at each step, you will be worse off. You will predict later that you’ll change your mind, unless you can force your future self to honor a commitment (or plan) you’d no longer want to keep when it actually comes time to honor it.
EDIT: my bad, the problem is that if you don’t use commitments, you could be worse off. Using backward induction in the Sally argument actually works fine, doesn’t leave you (or Sally) worse off and doesn’t require any commitment.
However, I do not think it can be infinite. The function f(x) = x can take an arbitrarily large value, but not an infinite value (its range is the set of real numbers).
St Petersburg doesn’t require any state to have infinite value. Its value is (canonically) 2^n with probability 1/2^n for each n at least 1. Always finite actual value, but infinite expected value.

Michael St Jules 🔸 11 Jul 2026 19:27 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Why does Parfit’s hitchhiker pose a problem?
Because the same kind of solution is available to someone with unsharp probabilities in Elga’s scenario, if you’re treating them fairly.
The St. Petersburg paradox involves an infinite expected payoff, and I reject infinite worlds.
It doesn’t require an infinite world, only that you can’t be 100% confident in any finite upper bound on your impact that you specify, and that there are infinitely many ways that the world could be (due largely to not full certainty about physics).
(But also 0% to infinite worlds seems epistemically immodest, doesn’t treat the evidence on each side fairly, and is poorly argued, imo. But I don’t want to rehash this.)
In Sally’s case, her money is the only thing that matters.
Why can’t the fact that she’d pick a dominated sequence or regret it if she rejects both bets matter to her after rejecting bet A?
I understand one should accept bet A based on that strategy. However, unsharp probabilities are supposed to allow for accepting or rejecting A?
They don’t have to in every case. If it was A in isolation, and no other decisions, then yes, both rejecting and accepting should be permissible. But that’s not the case presented to us.

Michael St Jules 🔸 11 Jul 2026 9:08 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Evan LaForge’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
As a rational actor with no useful information
mood

Michael St Jules 🔸 11 Jul 2026 9:06 UTC
7 points
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on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
3. SEQUENCE — Sequences of actions can be assessed for rationality independently of their parts: each of “reject A” and “reject B” can be individually permissible while the sequence “reject-A-then-reject-B” is impermissible. Elga turns the same Sally argument on it. SEQUENCE makes rejecting Bet B fine when no Bet A preceded it but irrational when it would complete the bad sequence—so it, too, imposes different requirements across two situations Sally can see are identical in everything she cares about. Hence SEQUENCE fails.
I don’t think this is a strong argument. There are other cases where you should make commitments that you would later be inclined to break, like Parfit’s hitchhiker, and St. Petersburg lotteries with unbounded utility functions. The latter is an argument that unbounded utility functions are irrational, based on similar logic.
Furthermore, “imposes different requirements across two situations Sally can see are identical in everything she cares about”. What if I do care about the differences? Or, is this any worse than picking numbers to ensure precision for no better reason than that they occured to you? Because that’s what it takes to produce arbitrarily precise probabilities if you fix what information is available to you in realistic settings.
Also, here’s another way someone with unsharp probabilities might handle this situation. In summary, I should accept bet A at the start to rule out the possibility of picking a dominated sequence:
1. If I accept bet A at the start, then the probability that I pick the dominated sequence (rejecting both) is 0.
2. If I reject bet A at the start and if I can’t guarantee that I will accept bet B next, then there’s some chance that I pick the dominated sequence.
If I compare 1 and 2 statewise, then 1 > 2 with some probability, and 1 and 2 are incomparable otherwise. In other words, either 1 beats 2, or I have no decisive reasons favouring either and I can ignore those cases. So I decide on the cases where 1 beats 2 and accept bet A at the start.
What links here?

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 Jul 2026 21:50 UTC
2 points
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on: The Learning Trap: What Simulated Clueless Agents Reveal About the Unawareness Argument
What would you recommend to handle cluelessness and unawareness about the far future and acausal influence, where contact and feedback may not be very practical or sufficiently informative? Maybe with the far future, we should just be extremely patient, possibly over 1000 years or more, and wait for that feedback anyway, but during that time, lots of confounders and clueless-making events could come up.
Or we simulate things in a lot of detail to try to get that feedback artificially, although that may mean simulating and realizing a lot of suffering.

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 Jul 2026 20:55 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: Announcing: Cluelessness Critiques Competition
(1) not “impartial” in the sense that some moral patients/consequences are bracketed out for not very well-motivated reasons, or (2) not action-guiding.
If you think it’s fair to map the “same” moral patient across worlds to themselves, assuming at least some transworld identity, then I’d guess we could work out counterpart relations extending transworld identity to cover contingent moral patients, maybe along the lines of Thomas, 2019, pp.30-31 where, roughly, we map each contingent moral patient under one choice to the statistical average of the contingent moral patients — across all of spacetime and the whole multiverse if we’re in one — under the other choice.^[1]
At first pass, if we’re clueless about the total welfare effects for any action or comparing any two actions, I’d guess we’d be clueless about the average contingent moral patient, and, at least on bottom-up bracketing, just bracket them out and ignore them. This would mean the theory acts like the strict person-affecting view, where only currently existing (or at least “necessary”) moral patients count, and we ignore (at least) the rest. That might sound bad, but we ignore them because we’re consistently clueless about whether their counterparts are better or worse off in expectation, which seems like a good principled reason to do that.
This could be practically action-guiding. You’d probably focus on near-term human welfare, because currently existing non-human animals that you could “affect” cost-effectively don’t typically live long enough for your actions today to help them (e.g. most live <2 years before slaughter, often <1 year), and you’re clueless about the welfare of the counterparts of the future/contingent animals you could “affect” cost-effectively.
But maybe speculative scenarios, including how TAI might play out, also make you clueless about how to benefit currently existing humans if, before bracketing, you’re aggregating and taking expectations over their entire futures or their current preferences pointing at things at least a few years away, and can’t bracket out the speculative scenarios. I imagine you could get around this by using transworld identity at each point of time^[2] and do bracketing before aggregating over their futures, so you can bracket out the periods of time you’re clueless about.
1. ^
  Maybe with some extra accounting for the number of moral patients to do. And this could get trickier with infinities.
2. ^
  Could need to account for relativity theory in some way.

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 Jul 2026 18:04 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: Announcing: Cluelessness Critiques Competition
Would you say bracketing isn’t fully impartial? It doesn’t seem less impartial than Scanlon’s Greater Burden Principle (or Tom Regan’s harm principle), which roughly says to choose between two actions, you should prioritize the individual(s) with the strongest claim or who has the most to lose counterfactually between options (not necessarily the worst off, to contrast with Rawls’ Difference Principle/maximin/leximin).
I guess methods of bracketing where admissible bracketings must group certain individuals, e.g. spatiotemporally or by causal paths affecting them, are more partial. But if you go with the unconstrained version, it seems basically impartial?
It is sensitive to differences between worlds beyond the number of individuals at each welfare level, because it has to identify each individual across worlds to take individual differences.

Michael St Jules 🔸 15 Jun 2026 19:12 UTC
11 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Only mammals and birds are sentient, according to neuroscientist Nick Humphrey’s theory of consciousness, recently explained in “Sentience: The invention of consciousness”
This also applies to many comments written by people? In general, whenever something is shared, one could invest more time to make it more accurate. However, to me it seems hard to come up with general rules about how much time to invest vetting claims.
If someone had a pattern of fabrication and very poor understanding (and apparent confidence) like LLMs often do if used uncritically, I would be annoyed with them and possibly do any of the following:
1. Tell them to read and review more carefully, look for opposing arguments, etc..
2. Downvote such comments (and I very very rarely downvote).
3. Stop engaging with this person, because it wastes my time and may encourage them to waste others’ time.
I think sharing long texts produced by LLMs is often fine even if they were not fully read by the person prompting, basically for the same reasons that it is fine to share long text produced by people even if the person sharing them did not fully read them.
I would request you check it yourself or at least run LLM critique passes, because of high rates of hallucination and other errors by LLMs.
Similarly, if there was an author who was just as consistently bad as LLMs are, and you shared their work uncritically like this, I’d recommend the same.
I have the impression many people, including academics, use “consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness” interchangeably, and without wanting to take a stance on illusionism or realism.
My impression is that many people, including academics, use “consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness” interchangeably, but they do so implicitly rejecting strong illusionism, would reject strong illusionism if asked directly, and typically don’t understand strong illusionism. Maybe many are open, though, I’m not sure.

Michael St Jules 🔸 15 Jun 2026 16:37 UTC
12 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Only mammals and birds are sentient, according to neuroscientist Nick Humphrey’s theory of consciousness, recently explained in “Sentience: The invention of consciousness”
Re AI, it’s a special case of Brandolini’s law:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
LLMs make it easy to produce a lot of plausible-looking but wrong or misleading claims quickly, and sharing them without checking yourself (or at least running another LLM to do that) puts the burden on others to correct.
I think you should make sure the claims are checked before sharing.
You could do this yourself, or run another critical LLM pass on the answer, e.g. a prompt like “Exhaustively verify and ruthlessly critique the above answer.”
The critique pass itself may turn up false positive critiques, and you might want to run a third pass to verify the critiques and write a new balanced answer.
(I agree that it’s also important to tag that it’s LLM output, and at least read it over yourself, which you did.)
However, illusionists acknowledge that phenomenal consciousness exists. They just argue it is not real in the sense it does not have the classic qualia properties. I seem to agree with this.
This is true of weak illusionists, but not strong illusionists. Strong illusionists reject phenomenal consciousness. Specifically they reject phenomenal properties; they accept that consciousness exists.
Would you do anything differently if you endorsed weak illusionism/realism as defined in Frankish (2016) instead of (strong) illusionism?
Other than argue about it, probably not much, assuming functionalism and materialism/physicalism of some kind that’s compatible with artificial sentience.
FWIW, my impression is that there are ways to interpret ‘what-it’s-like’ or ‘subjective’ consistently with strong illusionism, as, e.g. the specific patterns of discriminations a brain makes or what information is accessible to it (or its attention or its global workspace). I think Frankish himself has done this later.
But ‘phenomenal’ and ‘qualitative’ seem harder to pin down precisely in purely physical, discriminatory and informational terms in a way that I think would be broadly acceptable after critique and reflection to realists (including weak illusionists).

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jun 2026 23:53 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Only mammals and birds are sentient, according to neuroscientist Nick Humphrey’s theory of consciousness, recently explained in “Sentience: The invention of consciousness”
First, before responding to the specific claims in the Gemini output:
1. The Gemini output seems like AI slop, and I would recommend against passing along LLM outputs uncritically like this. The answer seems quite bad, most of what it said seems wrong or misguided. You could run another pass of an LLM on the answer to critique it to help a bit. I hope this doesn’t accurately represent Lau’s views. Illusionism is often misunderstood and strawmanned, including by academics, so there’s a lot of garbage out there for LLMs to have been trained on. Some of the problem with misunderstanding and strawmanning is probably due to its unfortunate name. (I’ll flag what looks bad below.)
2. I don’t see a plausible path for Lau’s view to solve the hard problem or meta problem of consciousness. Does Lau explain why people so often regard consciousness as non-physical, ethereal, having classic qualia properties, or some qualitative/subjective character beyond just the physical? Or does he reject that people often do regard consciousness this way?
  1. Specifically, I don’t see how reality monitoring helps. Internally generated mental imagery is still experienced. It’s just experienced differently.
  2. I’m not familiar with Lau’s theory; there’s problably more. But I’ve looked at so many theories, and my prior is to be extremely skeptical.
1. Macro-Level Summaries are Not “Illusions”
Is this section trying to say the non-physical “magic” is real? If not, how does it contradict illusionism?
Lau counters this with a functional analogy: macroscopic metrics are real, even if they ignore microscopic details. When a digital thermometer gives you a reading of 20°C, it is not giving you a detailed map of the kinetic energy of billions of individual air molecules. It is giving you a simplified, macroscopic summary. But that doesn’t mean “temperature” is an illusion or a false belief.
This looks a lot like what Graziano says about his own illusionist theory here, so doesn’t seem like a point against illusionism:
These models are not empty illusions: they are caricatures. They represent something physically real, but they are not accurate. Models never are. The brain’s models are useful, adaptive, simplified, and never fully accurate, yet they form the basis of our beliefs, thoughts, and claims.
That being said, I’d say the appearance of phenomenal properties is an illusion, and possibly an active misrepresentation, not merely a simplification. See Kammerer, 2019.
Similarly, Lau’s Perceptual Reality Monitoring (PRM) argues that the prefrontal cortex generates a macroscopic summary of sensory reliability. It evaluates a signal and outputs a tag: This is real and present. Just because that tag lacks the metadata of neurotransmitter release doesn’t make the resulting subjective experience an illusion. It is a highly accurate, biologically real computational output.
I don’t see how this solves the hard problem or meta problem.
2. The Fallacy of the “Perfect” Introspection
Illusionism relies on the premise that for consciousness to be real, it must perfectly match our intuitive, pre-scientific introspective beliefs about it (i.e., that it is magical, ethereal, or non-physical).
This is false. Illusionsim does not rely on such a premise.
Lau points out that this is an unfair standard. Science routinely redefines phenomena without eliminating them. When we discovered that water is H₂O rather than an indivisible classical element, we didn’t declare that water was an illusion. Lau argues we should treat consciousness the same way: it isn’t the magical inner theater we intuitively thought it was, but rather a physical, metacognitive reality-monitoring system. Redefining it doesn’t erase its existence.
Illusionism is (re)defining consciousness without eliminating it. What it eliminates is the “phenomenal” properties of consciousness, and classic qualia are roughly the only formalization/precisification of phenomenality so far that doesn’t end up strong illusionist. See Frankish’s Quining Diet Qualia. “What it feels like”, “subjective”, etc. are not formal/precise and don’t rule out strong illusionism.
And again, I don’t see how reality monitoring helps.
3. The Evolutionary Reality of “Presence”
Seems independent of illusionism vs realism. Mental imagery is still experienced, just differently. Is Lau (or just Gemini?) saying the feeling of presence is a phenomenal property, and mental imagery lacks all phenomenal properties? Would you agree that dreams, thoughts and visualizations aren’t phenomenally conscious experiences, but your externally generated experiences are phenomenally conscious? I don’t think this is compatible with what most would intend by “phenomenal consciousness”, and if this is what Lau (or Gemini?) wants to do, he’s working on a totally different problem from pretty much everyone else.
Summary
Lau would say that strong illusionists correctly identify that the brain uses simplified representations, but they make a fatal philosophical error in concluding that simplified representations are false.
Seems like a strawman. Strong illusionists don’t conclude that simplified representations are false. They conclude that there are no phenomenal properties, and any representations as if there are phenomenal properties are therefore misleading (illusions).

Michael St Jules 🔸 6 Jun 2026 17:06 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
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
36 points
0 ∶ 0
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 🔸

1. Macro-Level Summaries are Not “Illusions”

2. The Fallacy of the “Perfect” Introspection

3. The Evolutionary Reality of “Presence”

Summary