Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 12,428

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 🔸 23 Jul 2025 23:21 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Do short AI timelines make other cause areas useless?
Thanks for writing this!
I’m wondering about your factory farming analysis:
Consider the case of factory farming.^[6] Even if aligned AI is committed to or neutral about animal wellbeing, it’s unclear how, or how quickly, it would “solve” factory farming. It’s possible that AI could invent a method for producing cultured meat at a fraction of the cost of conventional meat, which could cause an end to factory farming. Even so, it would likely take years to build out the infrastructure to produce lab-grown meat and make it economically competitive with traditional agriculture.
How many years do you have in mind in here? I could imagine this going pretty quickly, and much faster than historically for growing industries, because:
1. AI lets us skip to much more efficient alt protein production processes, instead of iterative improvement over years of R&D.
2. AI designs faster and more efficient resource extraction and infrastructure building processes. Or, AI designs alt protein production processes that can make good use of other processes and the market at the time.
3. Capital investment could be very high because of
  1. AI-related economic growth,
  2. interest from now far wealthier AI investors, including billionaire tech (ex-)CEOs, and/or
  3. proof of efficient alt protein production process designs, rather than investors waiting for more R&D.
The time it takes to build alt protein production plants could be the main bottleneck, and many could be built in parallel, enough to exhaust expected demand after undercutting conventional animal products. Maybe this takes a couple of years after efficient alt protein processes are designed by AI?
Fairly speculative, of course. Seems like high ambiguity here.
More pessimistically, we probably won’t end factory farming through technology alone. People have been hesitant to switch to meat substitutes and lab-grown meat. Multinational corporations have significant financial interests in factory farming, and they will also use AI to promote their position. Cultural, political, and economic changes will be necessary.
I agree with this. However, I wonder how far off sufficient economic changes would be. People could become wealthy enough to pay for (or subsidize others for) high welfare animal products, and this could eliminate the rest of factory farming. Transitioning housing types could take some time, but with enough money thrown at it, it could be very quick. Again, fairly speculative.

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Jul 2025 0:37 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: A shallow review of what transformative AI means for animal welfare
RE #4, if technological chance is happening that quickly, it seems implausible that McDonald’s will survive. They didn’t have anything comparable to McDonald’s 1000 years ago. They couldn’t have even imagined McDonald’s. I predict that a decade after TAI, if we’re still alive, then whatever stuff we have will look nothing like McDonald’s, in the same way that McDonald’s looks nothing like the stuff people had in medieval times.
If we’re still alive, most of the same people will still be alive, and their tastes, habits and values will only have changed so much. Think conservatives, people against alt proteins and others who grew up with McDonald’s. 1000 years is enough time for dramatic shifts in culture and values, but 10 years doesn’t seem to be. I suspect shifts in culture and values are primarily driven by newer generations just growing up to have different values and older generations with older values dying, not people changing their minds.
And radical life extension might make some values and practices persist far longer than they would have otherwise, although I’m not sure how much people who’d still want to eat conventional meat would opt for radical life extension.

Michael St Jules 🔸 16 Jul 2025 21:31 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ali.fish’s comment on: A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies
Standard wild-capture methods, particularly purse seining, typically result in prolonged deaths by asphyxiation, crushing, or decompression, with no stunning or humane slaughter protocols in place. The scale of suffering in these fisheries is enormous and remains largely invisible.
Because of fishery policies that could make supply very inelastic, like quotas or appropriately responsive closures or limits on fleet capacity, it’s not clear that vegans adding sardines and anchovies to their diets actually increases the number of such deaths. Furthermore, if there’s overfishing, the effect of increasing demand may be to reduce the number of such deaths. See my posts Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too and The responsiveness of aquatic animal supply.

Michael St Jules 🔸 13 Jul 2025 23:12 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies
For several years, I’ve been vegan basically other than bivalves, but I started taking actual fish oil supplements (anchovy-based) a few months ago.^[1] I started taking actual fish oil, because:
1. I was more confident in the benefits of >50% EPA omega-3 supplements than I was in >50% DHA omega-3 supplements^[2]^[3],
2. I couldn’t find cheap enough vegan supplements for which the omega-3 was >50% EPA (I used these for some time, but they are pretty expensive, because I was taking multiple per day) or cheap and practical bivalve sources that were consistently >50% EPA from omega-3 and had low omega-6,
3. I was concerned that EPA and DHA might compete, so that just taking more of an omega-3 supplement that’s >50% DHA might not help as much, although I’m very unsure about this, and
4. the effects on animals aren’t clearly worse (rather than better) than not eating them or eating alternatives (see my sequence, and this thread on this post.)
I just got Perplexity to do some related “Deep Research” here. Its answer to the first prompt suggests competition isn’t much of a concern, while its answer to the second suggests that >50% EPA omega-3 supplements tend to be better for brain function than >50% DHA omega-3 supplements, but it depends on the brain functions you’re most interested in; higher DHA is recommended for memory and cognitive aging. Also, the usual warning about LLMs hallucinating or otherwise not being accurate.
1. ^
  I take 4 of these per day, for 1600 mg of EPA and 800mg of DHA per day.
2. ^
  Firth et al., 2019, figure 2 suggests >50% EPA supplements are effective in treating depression, and there’s not enough evidence to suggest >50% DHA supplements are effective in treating depression, despite multiple studies with many participants in total. However, I didn’t check doses.
3. ^
  From the Wikipedia page on EPA:
  Although studies of fish oil supplements, which contain both docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and EPA, have failed to support claims of preventing heart attacks or strokes,^[2]^[3]^[4] a recent multi-year study of Vascepa (ethyl eicosapentaenoate, the ethyl ester of the free fatty acid), a prescription drug containing only EPA, was shown to reduce heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular death by 25% relative to a placebo in those with statin-resistant hypertriglyceridemia.^[5]^[6]

Michael St Jules 🔸 13 Jul 2025 20:49 UTC
20 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Debate: organisations using Rethink Priorities’ mainline welfare ranges should consider effects on soil nematodes, mites, and springtails, or at least be transparent about their reasons for neglecting them?
Even just the effects on wild insects could be important, so anyone who is interested in insect welfare should be interested in these effects, too, or have good reason to ignore them, which I’d be interested in knowing (and possibly challenging).
I’d also tentatively put mites, springtails and farmed insect larvae at similar welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience, although quite uncertain. So, if you count farmed insect larvae as worthy of moral consideration at all, you should probably count mites and springtails, too, and to similar degrees on welfarist grounds.
I think some potentially good reasons to ignore the effects on wild terrestrial invertebrates are the following:
1. You think we’ll have much larger expected impact on invertebrates with the invertebrate work we (or you) support or will support. Maybe (y)our portfolio of interventions will be positive in expectation across groups of welfare ranges and probabilities of sentience.
  1. I think this requires at least comparing to estimates of the effects of vertebrate-targeting interventions on wild terrestrial invertebrates, e.g. Vasco’s, to be justified. So you aren’t exactly ignoring the effects at all. That ~36% of the world’s habitable land is used for animal agriculture, directly or for feed,^[1] seems like a good reason to believe that animal agriculture is one of the main ways we affect wild (terrestrial) invertebrates and that some of the highest leverage vertebrate interventions will be among the highest leverage for wild invertebrates.
2. You think the impacts on wild terrestrial invertebrates are generally good anyway, but don’t differ enough between interventions to outweigh reasons for sometimes prioritizing vertebrates (e.g. normative uncertainty or a portfolio that’s robustly good across sentience and welfare range groups).
  1. I’d want to know why. I have some doubts for animal product reduction, e.g. work to support alternative proteins and veg food advocacy.
3. You’re clueless about the effects on wild terrestrial invertebrates (e.g. given uncertainty about their expected average welfare, or tradeoffs between natural deaths and crop deaths) and you ignore them on the basis of cluelessness, using imprecise credences.
  1. Even as someone suffering-focused, I’m currently clueless about the expected effects of crop agriculture on wild terrestrial invertebrates. It seems like pesticide deaths could be far worse than natural deaths, generally at least as intense at their worst as natural deaths and often more drawn out, enough to make up for and possibly outweigh the reduction in population sizes. I think the (expected) effects could go either way, and we probably need more primary research to decide which way.
    However, I do think beef/grazing/pasture reduces wild terrestrial invertebrate suffering. So, if you’re ignoring some effects, it seems like you should separate the crop and pasture effects and deal with them separately. They affect different individuals living in different areas.
  2. FWIW, this is not the same as assuming the expected effects are precisely 0 and then ignoring them because of that. It would be an incredibly suspicious coincidence if the expected effects were exactly 0. You’d have to ignore (almost) all evidence about the actual lives of these animals and the effects of agriculture, and rely (almost) entirely on a symmetric prior, and that doesn’t seem justified to me.
4. Non-consequentialist / non-welfarist reasons.
  1. I don’t personally consider these to be good reasons, but I see ethics as mostly subjective, so they can be good reasons to other people.
1. ^
  7% for crops for direct human consumption, 1% for urban and built-up land, including settlements and infrastructure, and 12-13% for logging for wood. I expect almost all of the rest of habitable land to be left alone, some possibly abandoned and allowed to rewild.

Michael St Jules 🔸 11 Jul 2025 20:02 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Popa’s comment on: A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies
If we’re talking about an increasing demand shift for sardines and anchovies from people who would otherwise abstain from eating fish, this would increase the price of fishmeal and make farmed insects look relatively more attractive as a potential feed for farmed fish, especially salmon. So, this could increase insect farming, too.
On the other hand, shifting people from eating farmed fish to eating sardines and anchovies could reduce both fish farming and insect farming (as well as crop agriculture for feed, but I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad).

Michael St Jules 🔸 10 Jul 2025 23:57 UTC
9 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: LewisBollard’s comment on: A shallow review of what transformative AI means for animal welfare
Under 4, we should consider possibilities of massive wealth gains from automation, and that the cage-free shift would have happened anyway or at much lower (relative) cost without our work before the AI transition and paradigm shift. People still want to eat eggs out of habit, food neophobia or for cultural or political or any other reasons. However, consumers become so wealthy that the difference in cost between caged and cage-free is no longer significant to them, and they would just pay it, or are much more open to cage-free (and other high welfare) legislation..
Or, maybe some animal advocates (who invested in AI or even the market broadly) become so wealthy that they could subsidize people or farms to switch to cage-free. If this is “our money”, then this looks more like investing to give and just optimal donation timing. If this is not “our money”, say, because we’re not coordinating that closely with these advocates and have little influence on their choices, then it looks like someone else solving the problem later.

Michael St Jules 🔸 10 Jul 2025 15:18 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Elizabeth Crewe’s comment on: A Vegan Case for Eating Sardines and Anchovies
FWIW, I wouldn’t consider planktonic animals necessarily brainless or unworthy of moral consideration. Peruvian anchoveta eat krill, which I imagine to be sentient with modest probability, and copepods, which I consider worth researching more.

Michael St Jules 🔸 9 Jul 2025 23:32 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness accounting for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails
Also, the primary beneficiaries of GiveWell-recommended charities are mostly infants and children, who eat less.

Michael St Jules 🔸 7 Jul 2025 17:35 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Do we need a new Moral Weights Project?
In case anyone is interested, I also have:
1. unpublished material on the conscious subsystems hypothesis, related to neuron count measures, with my own quantitative models, arguments for my parameter choices/bounds and sensitivity analysis for chickens vs humans. Feel free to message me for access.
2. arguments for animals mattering a lot in expectation on non-hedonistic stances here and here, distinct from RP’s.

Michael St Jules 🔸 7 Jul 2025 14:55 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Resource guide: Unawareness, indeterminacy, and cluelessness
Maybe you can turn this into a FAQ by pulling out quotes or having an LLM summarize the explanations in your citations? I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, though, because people can just go read the citations.

Michael St Jules 🔸 4 Jul 2025 19:29 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kevin Xia 🔸’s comment on: How could AI affect different animal advocacy interventions?
I’d argue that cheaper higher animal welfare and alternative proteins in X years suggest that interventions will be more cost-effective in X years, which might imply that we should “save and invest” (either literally, in capital, or conceptually, in movement capacity). Do you have any thoughts on that?
I agree they could be cheaper (in relative terms), but also possibly far more likely to happen without us saving and investing more on the margin. It’s probably worth ensuring a decent sum of money is saved and invested for this possibility, though.
Your 4 priorities seem reasonable to me. I might aim 2, 3 and 4 primarily at potentially extremely high payoff interventions, e.g. s-risks. They should beat 1 in expectation, and we should have plausible models for how they could.

Michael St Jules 🔸 3 Jul 2025 23:44 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Why Are You, an Effective Altruist, Donating Money to Charity?
It seems likely to me that donation opportunities will become less cost-effective over time, as problems become increasingly solved by economic growth and other agents. For example, the poorest people in the future will be wealthier and better off than the poorest people today. And animal welfare in the future will be better than today (although things could get worse before they get better, especially for farmed insects).

Michael St Jules 🔸 2 Jul 2025 22:18 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
on: How could AI affect different animal advocacy interventions?
Thanks for writing this!
What works today may be obsolete tomorrow
I’d like to reinforce and expand on this point. I think it pushes us towards interventions that benefit animals earlier or with potentially large lasting counterfactual impacts through an AI transition. If the world or animal welfare donors specifically will be far wealthier in X years, then higher animal welfare and satisfying alternative proteins will be extremely cheap in relative terms in X years and we’ll get them basically for free, so we should probably severely discount any potential counterfactual impacts past X years.
I would personally focus on large payoffs within the next ~10 years and maybe work to shape space colonization to reduce s-risks, each when we’re justified in believing the upsides outweigh the backfire risks, in a way that isn’t very sensitive to our direct intuitions.

Michael St Jules 🔸 30 Jun 2025 19:46 UTC
18 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Do we need a new Moral Weights Project?
I’m not sure it needs a whole other large project, especially one started from scratch. You could just have a few people push further on these points, which seem like the most likely cruxes:
1. Further developing and defending measures that scale with neuron counts.
2. Assessing animals on normative stances besides expectational hedonistic utilitarianism.
3. Defending less animal-friendly responses to the two envelopes problem (see prior writing and the comments here, here, here, here, here and here).
4. EDIT, also: Assessing the probability that invertebrates of interest (and perhaps other animals of interest) can experience excruciating or unbearable pain, as effectively all-consuming pain an animal would be desperate and take incredible risks to avoid.
And then have them come up with their own models and estimates. They could mostly rely on the studies and data RP collected on animals, although they could check the ones that seem most cruxy, too.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 Jun 2025 0:53 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 4. Why existing approaches to cause prioritization are not robust to unawareness
Against option 3, you write:
There are many different ways of carving up the set of “effects” according to the reasoning above, which favor different strategies. For example: I might say that I’m confident that an AMF donation saves lives, and I’m clueless about its long-term effects overall. Yet I could just as well say I’m confident that there’s some nontrivially likely possible world containing an astronomical number of happy lives, which the donation makes less likely via potentially increasing x-risk, and I’m clueless about all the other effects overall. So, at least without an argument that some decomposition of the effects is normatively privileged over others, Option 3 won’t give us much action guidance.
Wouldn’t you also say that the donation makes these happy lives more likely on some elements of your representor via potentially increasing x-risk? So then they’re neither made determinately better off nor determinately worse off in expectation, and we can (maybe) ignore them.
Maybe you need some account of transworld identity (or counterparts) to match these lives across possible worlds, though.

Michael St Jules 🔸 26 Jun 2025 22:03 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future
I haven’t read much of this post, so just call me out if this is totally off base, but I suspect you’re treating events as more “independent” than you should.
Relevant: A nuclear war forecast is not a coin flip by David Johnston.
I also illustrated in a comment there:
On the other extreme, we could imagine repeatedly flipping a coin with only heads on it, or a coin with only tails on it, but we don’t know which, but we think it’s probably the one only with heads. Of course, this goes too far, since only one coin flip outcome is enough to find out what coin we were flipping. Instead, we could imagine two coins, one with only heads (or extremely biased towards heads), and the other a fair coin, and we lose if we get tails. The more heads we get, the more confident we should be that we have the heads-only coin.
To translate this into risks, we don’t know what kind of world we live in and how vulnerable it is to a given risk, and the probability that the world is vulnerable to the given risk at all an upper bound for the probability of catastrophe. As you suggest, the more time goes on without catastrophe, the more confident we should be that we aren’t so vulnerable.

Michael St Jules 🔸 4 Jun 2025 16:03 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Nicolas Mace’s comment on: Hedging against deep and moral uncertainty
Hi Nicolas, thanks for commenting!
Whether or not you think you can add separate components seems pretty important for the hedging approach.
Indeed, if a portfolio dominates the default on each individual component, then some interventions in the portfolio must dominate the default overall.^[1] So if you can compare interventions based on their total effects, the existence of such portfolios imply that some interventions dominate the default.
Ah, good point. (You’re assuming the separate components can be added directly (or with fixed weights, say).)
I guess the cases where you can’t add directly (or with fixed weights) involve genuine normative uncertainty or incommensurability. Or, maybe some cases of two envelopes problems where it’s too difficult or unjustifiable to set a unique common scale and use the Bayesian solution.
In practice, I may have normative uncertainty about moral weights between species.
Intuitively then, you would prefer investing in one of those interventions over hedging?
If you’re risk neutral, probably. Maybe not if you’re difference-making risk averse. Perhaps helping insects is robustly positive in expectation, but highly likely to have no impact at all. Then you might like a better chance of positive impact, while maintaining 0 (or low) probability of negative impact.
Given the above, a worry I have is that the hedging approach doesn’t save us from cluelessness, because we don’t have access to an overall-better-than-the-default intervention to begin with.
For my illustration, that’s right.
However, my illustration treats the components as independent, so that you can get the worst case on each of them together. But this need not be the case in practice. You could in principle have interventions A and B, both with ranges of (expected) cost-effectiveness [-1, 2], but whose sum is exactly 1. Let the cost-effectiveness of B be 1-”the cost-effectiveness of A”. Having things cancel out so exactly and ending up with a range that’s a single value is unrealistic, but I wonder if we could at least get a positive range this way.
(Although a complication I haven’t thought about is that you should compare interventions with one another too, unless you think the default has a privileged status.)
Ya, the default doesn’t seem privileged if you’re a consequentialist. See this post.

Michael St Jules 🔸 4 Jun 2025 10:11 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness accounting for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails
If using precise credences, then I’d be a strong longtermist (probably focusing on existential risks of some kind) or chase infinities. I haven’t thought a lot from this perspective about practical donation recommendations, if I’m assuming not suffering-focused. If suffering-focused (like I actually am), then probably CLR.

Michael St Jules 🔸 4 Jun 2025 9:56 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: tobycrisford 🔸’s comment on: Cost-effectiveness accounting for soil nematodes, mites, and springtails
Yes, absolutely right about 0 being possible and reaonably likely. Maybe I’d say “average welfare conditional on having any welfare at all”. I only added that so that X% likely to be negative meant (100-X)% likely to be positive, in order to simplify the argument.