Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 12,883

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 🔸 5 Jun 2026 13:49 UTC
2 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.

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Apr 2026 7:04 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty
I think not, due to gradations and multiple reference points (even within hedonic scales only).

Michael St Jules 🔸 1 Apr 2026 1:20 UTC
2 points
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on: Better difference-making views
Some thoughts about using the “random option” as the default:
1. Under increasing model ambiguity, evenly allocating your portfolio maximizes the minimum expected value. Now, a random option is not a deterministic even allocation across the options. But if our resoucres (money, time, attention/motivation) are divisible, then randomly assiging each minimum unit will tend to approximate the even allocation, and increasingly so the more we divide the units, by the law of large numbers.^[1]
2. If the random option is taken to be a random micro-action, e.g. a small muscle contraction, a fraction of a second of thought, then almost all of the random options are basically just noise, sequentially uncoordinated, and achieve nothing. In practice, the random option would be functionally equivalent to “Do nothing”.
1. ^
  Obviously dividing your time totally randomly into tiny non-contiguous units is horrible for actually achieving anything. Maybe we just combine them into bigger contiguous blocks by assumption. Or we allow some kind of cooperation or positive-sum trades that will often in practice lead to contiguous blocks of time.

Michael St Jules 🔸 31 Mar 2026 12:03 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Solving the moral cluelessness problem with Bayesian joint probability distributions
Do you (Michael) see your views about precise and imprecise credences significantly affecting what you would actually do in the real world in a scenario where you had to blame Jones or Smith?
Probably not. I see it as more illustrative of important cases. Imagine instead it’s between supporting an intervention or not, and it has similar complexity and considerations going in each direction.
More relevant examples to us could be: crops vs nature for wild animals, climate change on wild animals, fishing on wild animals, the far future effects of our actions, the acausal influence of our actions. These are all things I feel clueless enough about to mostly bracket away and ignore when they are side effects of direct interventions I’m interested in supporting. I’m not ignoring them because I think they’re small. I think they are likely much larger than the effects I’m not ignoring.
I may also want to further study some of them, but I’m often not that optimistic about making much progress (especially for far future effrcts and acausal influence) and for that progress to be used in a way that isn’t net negative overall by my lights.