Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 12,586

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 🔸 7 Dec 2025 18:47 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: 4. Why existing approaches to cause prioritization are not robust to unawareness
I suspect we need to involve our criteria for defining and picking bracketings here.
In practice, I think it doesn’t make sense to just bracket in the bad long-term effects or just bracket in the good ones. You might be able to carve out bracketings that include only bad (or only good) long-term effects and effects outweighed by them, but not all bad (or all good) long-term effects. But that will depend on the particulars.
I think if we only do spatiotemporal bracketing, it tells us to ignore the far future and causally inaccessible spacetime locations, because each such location is made neither determinately better off in expectation nor determinately worse off in expectation. I’m not entirely sure where the time cutoff should start in practice, but it would be related to AGI’s arrival. That could make us neartermist.
But we may also want to bracket out possibilities, not just ST locations. Maybe we can bracket out AGI by date X, for various X (or the min probability of it across choices, in case we affect its probability), and focus on non-AGI outcomes we may be more clueful about. If we bracket out the right set of possibilities, maybe some longtermist interventions will look best.

Michael St Jules 🔸 26 Nov 2025 23:23 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Caring about Bugs Isn’t Weird
My sense is that if you’re weighing nematodes, you should also consider things like conscious subsystems or experience sizes that could tell you larger-brained animals have thousands or millions of times more valenced experiences or more valence at a time per individual organism. For example, if a nematode realizes some valence-generating function (or indicator) once with its ~302 neurons, how many times could a chicken brain, with ~200 million neurons, separately realize a similar function? What about a cow brain, with 3 billion neurons?
Taking expected values over those hypotheses and different possible scaling law hypotheses tends, on credences I find plausible, to lead to expected moral weights scaling roughly proportionally with the number of neurons (see the illustration in the conscious subsystems post). But nematodes (and other wild invertebrates) could still matter a lot even on proportional weighing, e.g. as you found here.

Michael St Jules 🔸 24 Nov 2025 17:39 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Caring about Bugs Isn’t Weird
Ya, bracketing on its own wouldn’t tell you to ignore a potential group of moral patients just because its probability of sentience is very small. The numbers could compensate. It’s more that conditional on sentience, we’d have to be clueless about whether they’re made better or worse off. And we may often be in this position in practice.
I think you could still want some kind of difference-making view or bounded utility function used with bracketing, so that you can discount extreme overall downsides more than proportionally to their probability, along with extreme upsides. Or do something like Nicolausian discounting, i.e. ignoring small probabilities.

Michael St Jules 🔸 24 Nov 2025 8:06 UTC
20 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Caring about Bugs Isn’t Weird
Great post! :)
Third, it’s easy for an org to think it’s helping when it’s hurting: we know so little about how to help that some caution is warranted. I don’t just want to do good in expectation: I want to do good.
FWIW, I think this would count against most animal interventions targeting vertebrates (welfare reforms, reductions in production), and possibly lead to paralysis pretty generally, and not just for animal advocates.
If we give extra weight to net harm over net benefits compared to inaction, as in typical difference-making views, I think most animal interventions targeting vertebrates will look worse than doing nothing, considering only the effects on Earth or in the next 20 years, say. This is because:
1. there are possibly far larger effects on wild invertebrates (even just wild insects and shrimp, but also of course also mites, springtails, nematodes and copepods) through land use change and effects on fishing, and huge net harm is possible through harming them, and
2. there’s usually at least around as much reason to expect large net harm to wild animals as there is to expect large net benefit to them, and difference-making gives more weight to the former, so it will dominate.
There could be similar stories for the far future and acausally, replacing wild animals on Earth with far future moral patients and aliens. There are also possibilities and effects of which we’re totally unaware.
That being said, I suspect typical accounts of difference-making lead to paralysis pretty generally for similar reasons. This isn’t just a problem for animal interventions. I discussed this and proposed some alternative accounts here.
Bracketing can also sometimes help. It’s an attempt to formalize the idea that when we’re clueless about whether some group of moral patients is made better off or worse off, we can just ignore them and focus on those we are clueful about.

Michael St Jules 🔸 22 Nov 2025 0:29 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Help the most neglected farmed mammals —replacing feeder rodents with alternatives that win on cost and convenience
Sounds exciting!
Do you have an estimate of the cost of the product per rodent spared you can share? This could help set a lower bound on the potential cost-effectiveness, where in the roughly worst case, donors, grantmakers or impact investors buy or subsidize the product for snake owners, similar to SWP buying stunners for shrimp producers.

Michael St Jules 🔸 16 Nov 2025 18:43 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What is the current best estimate of the cumulative elasticity of chicken?
(Edited: had the comparison of sizes flipped.)
One thought I’ve just had about this: these “cumulative elasticities” assume demand/price shifts just for one product at a time, and will therefore be too (EDIT) low if used for the effects of people going veg or reducing their consumption of multiple animal products. Here’s why:
1. Suppose one person (or a large group of them) just cuts out chicken, and for simplicity, they don’t eat more of anything else to compensate. That reduces the price of chicken. Other people will eat more chicken and less of everything else (including other animal products) to compensate, all else (or at least elasticities) equal. All else equal, it will also disproportionately affect chicken production.
2. Now, suppose this same person (or same large group of people) go vegan. This reduces the price of all animal products. Instead of others consuming more chicken and less of everything else in response, they consume more animal products all around (all else equal) and less plant-based food. The effect of other consumers on chicken in particular will be smaller than in 1, because they aren’t shifting away from other animal products to eat more chicken in particular. So more of the demand shift goes through.
It can also matter whether the elasticities were determined in a model with multiple products (general equilibrium), including with cross-price elasticities of demand, or just a single-product market. In models with multiple products, when you estimate the price elasticity of chicken demand, you’re adjusting for other prices and quantities besides chicken’s. In a model with just chicken prices and quantities, you aren’t adjusting for other products’ prices and quantities. These elasticities will differ.

Michael St Jules 🔸 20 Oct 2025 21:15 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Some thoughts on fanaticism
Great post, thanks for writing!
I buy that individuals should try to pick “policies” and psychologically commit themselves to them, rather than only evaluate actions one at a time. I think this totally makes sense for seatbelts and helmets. However, I’m not sure it requires evaluating actions collectively at a fundamental normative level rather than practically, especially across individuals. I think we can defend wearing seatbelts and helmets with Nicolausian discounting without supporting longtermism or x-risk work to most individuals, even if the marginal x-risk opportunity were similar to the average or best already funded.
In particular, I know that if I don’t wear my seatbelt this time in a car by some logic that is not very circumstance-specific, I could use similar logic in the future to keep talking myself out of wearing a seatbelt, and those risks would accumulate into a larger risk that could be above the discount threshold. So I should stop myself now to minimize that risk. I should consider the effects of my reasoning and decision now on my own future decisions.
However, I don’t have nearly as much potential influence over humanity’s x-risk strategy (causally or acausally) and the probability of an existential catastrophe. The typical individual has hardly any potential influence.
Also, separately, how would you decide who or what is included in the collective? Should we include the very agents creating the problems for us?

Michael St Jules 🔸 9 Oct 2025 12:35 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: JesseClifton’s comment on: [Linkpost] Bracketing Cluelessness
FWIW, unless you have reason otherwise (you may very well think some Fs are more likely than others), there’s some symmetry here between any function F and the function 1-F, and I think if you apply it, you could say P(F > ¹⁄₂) = P(1-F < ¹⁄₂) = P(F < ¹⁄₂), so P(F < ¹⁄₂) ≤ ¹⁄₂, and strictly less iff P(F = ¹⁄₂) > 0.
If you can rule out P(F = ¹⁄₂) > 0 (say by an additional assumption), or the bet were on F ≤ ¹⁄₂ instead of F < ¹⁄₂, then the probability would just be ¹⁄₂.

Michael St Jules 🔸 26 Sep 2025 19:22 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Giving multiplier of Giving What We Can
I recommend funding GWWC and the Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research’s (CEARCH’s) High Impact Philanthropy Fund (HIPF) due their effects on soil animals, which I think are practically proportional to the increase in agricultural-land-years per $. I estimate HIPF increases agricultural land 9.42 times as cost-effectively as GiveWell’s top charities, which is similar to my estimates for the giving multiplier of GWWC in 2023 and 2024.
A few quick comments:
1. GWWC donors don’t only give to GiveWell (or other life-saving) charities, so you’d want to discount by the proportion going to them.
2. There might be other charities that GWWC supporters donate to that will increase soil animal populations in expectation, e.g. some diet change and alternative protein work. You’d probably want to check the net effect combining them.

Michael St Jules 🔸 25 Sep 2025 19:34 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Guillaume Corlouer’s comment on: Bracketing cluelessness: A new theory of altruistic decision-making
(Edited to elaborate.)
I think bracketing agents could be moved to bracket out and ignore value of information sometimes and more often than EV-maxers, but it’s worth breaking things down further to see when. Imagine we’re considering an intervention with:
1. Direct effects on a group of moral patients (or locations of value), and we’re clueless about those effects.
2. Some (expected) value of information for another group of moral patients (possibly the same group, a disjoint group or intersecting the group in 1).
Then:
a. If the group in 2 is disjoint from the group in 1, then we can bracket out those affected in 1 and decide just on the basis of the expected value of information in 2 (and opportunity costs).
b. If the group in 2 is a subset of the group in 1, then the minimum expected value of information needs to be high enough to overcome the potential expected worst case downsides from the direct effects on the group in 1, for the intervention to beat doing nothing. The VOI can get bracketed away and ignored along with the direct effects in 1.
And there are intermediate cases, with probably intermediate recommendations.

Michael St Jules 🔸 25 Sep 2025 18:58 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby_Ord’s comment on: Evaluating the Infinite
Without continuity (but maybe some weaker assumptions required), I think you get a representation theorem giving lexicographically ordered ordinal sequences of real utilities, i.e. a sequence of expected values, which you compare lexicographically. With an infinitary extension of independence or the sure-thing principle, you get lexicographically ordered ordinal sequences of bounded real utilities, ruling out St Pesterburg-like prospects, and so also ruling out risk neutral expectational utilitarianism.

Michael St Jules 🔸 16 Sep 2025 16:06 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: antimonyanthony’s Shortform
Is there a way to retract a vote? I accidentally voted (I’m not skeptical of cluelessness).

Michael St Jules 🔸 29 Aug 2025 20:08 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness of Anima International Poland
Yes, good point. It’s worth checking if the delay could have a significant impact.

Michael St Jules 🔸 29 Aug 2025 18:51 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness of Anima International Poland
It might not be a genuine supply shift, if the same business/company would just want to set up elsewhere. You could model the probability that they wouldn’t, so there would be a supply shift, and then use elasticities for that.

Michael St Jules 🔸 23 Aug 2025 6:29 UTC
18 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸’s comment on: We (still) need more aquatic animal projects
FWIW, since 2022 (so after SWP and FWI), I count:
1. Scale Welfare (founded in 2025, but I think the idea was recommended for a few years?)
2. A charity working on fish welfare in Europe (founded in 2024), not listed on their website
3. Another working on fish started because of AIM in 2023, but not an official incubatee and not listed on their website.

Michael St Jules 🔸 22 Aug 2025 17:19 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why I’m A Fanatic!
One way you could think about the St Petersburg lottery money pump is that the future version of yourself after evaluating the lottery just has different preferences or is a different agent. Now, you might say your preferences should be consistent over time and after evaluations, but why? I think the main reason is to avoid picking dominated outcome distributions, but there could be other ways to do that in practice, e.g. pre-commitments, resolute choice, burning bridges, trades, etc.. You would want to do the same thing for Parfit’s hitchhiker. And you would similarly want to constrain the choices of or make trades with other agents with different preferences, if you were handing off the decision-making to them.
I grant that this is pretty weird. But I think it’s weird because of the mathematical property that an infinite function can have where it’s average value (or its expected value) can be greater than any possible value it might have. In light of such a situation, it’s not particularly surprising that each time you discover the outcome of the situation, you’ll be disappointed and want to trade it away. If a view has weird implications because of weird math, that is the fault of the math, not of the view.
I’m not sure I would only blame the math, or that you should really separate the math from the view.
Basically all of the arguments for the finitary independence axiom and finitary sure-thing principle are also arguments for their infinitary versions, and then they imply “bounded” utility functions.^[1] You could make exceptions for unbounded prospects and infinities because infinites are weird, but you should also probably accept that you’re at least somewhat undermining some of your arguments for fanaticism in the first place, because they won’t hold in full generality.
Indeed, I would say fanaticism is less instrumentally rational than bounded utility functions, i.e. more prone to making dominated choices. But there can be genuine tradeoffs between instrumental rationality and other desiderata. I don’t see why sometimes in theory making dominated choices is worse than sacrificing other desiderata. Either way, you’re losing something.
In my case, I’m willing to sacrifice some instrumental rationality to avoid fanaticism, so I’m sympathetic to some difference-making views.
1. ^
  See Jeffrey Sanford Russell, and Yoaav Isaacs. “Infinite Prospects*.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 103, no. 1, Wiley, July 2020, pp. 178–98, https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12704, https://philarchive.org/rec/RUSINP-2
  That assumes independence of irrelevant alternatives, transitivity and completeness, but I’d think you can drop completeness and get a similar result, with “multi-utility functions”.

Michael St Jules 🔸 17 Aug 2025 20:17 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Howard🔸’s comment on: Should I have been asked to stop posting about soil animals on Hive’s Slack?
I’d follow something like these:
1. https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/invertebrate-sentience-useful-empirical-resource/
2. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2022.788289/full
3. check for functions (causal roles) that can be reasonably interpreted as generating appearances of stimuli as good/desirable/worth promoting or bad/undesirable/worth avoiding. These are enough for moral status in my view, but pain and pleasure could be more specific. Or, what does it mean for something to be painful or pleasurable in functionalist terms? Develop that, and check for it in nematodes.
It’s unlikely that any of this will be conclusive, but it can inform reasonable ranges of probabilities.
On the question of what they find painful or pleasurable, check what they tend to avoid and approach, respectively, especially through learned behaviour (and especially more general types of learning) or internal simulation of outcomes of actions, rather than in-built reflexive behaviour and very simple forms of learning like habituation.
EDIT: You can also validate with measures of brain activity and nociception. There are probably features common to (apparently) painful experiences in nematodes, and features common to pleasurable ones in nematodes, which could be identified and then checked for across experiences.

Michael St Jules 🔸 15 Aug 2025 17:47 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Henry Howard🔸’s comment on: Should I have been asked to stop posting about soil animals on Hive’s Slack?
What about doing Welfare Footprint-like analysis (e.g. here), but including both positive and negative experiences, and investigating what kinds of behavioural tradeoffs they make between different (intensities of) experiences to weigh intensities?

Michael St Jules 🔸 31 Jul 2025 18:05 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: abrahamrowe’s Shortform
Ok, that makes sense. I’d guess butterfly effects would be neutral in the median difference. The same could be the case for indirect effects on wild animals and the far future, although I’d say it’s highly ambiguous (imprecise probabilities) and something to be clueless about, and not precisely neutral about.
Would you say you care about the overall distribution of differences, too, and not just the median and the EV?

Michael St Jules 🔸 30 Jul 2025 20:23 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: abrahamrowe’s comment on: abrahamrowe’s Shortform
(I’m guessing you mean difference-making risk aversion here, based on your options being implicitly compared to doing nothing.)
When considering the potential of larger indirect effects on wild invertebrates, the far future and other butterfly effects, which interventions do you think look good (better than doing nothing) on difference-making risk aversion (or difference-making ambiguity aversion)?
(I suspect there are none for modest levels of difference-making risk/ambiguity aversion, and we should be thinking about difference-making in different ways.)