MSJ

Michael St Jules 🔸

Animal welfare grantmaking and advising
12772 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Vancouver, BC, Canada

Bio

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

Sequences
3

Radical empathy
Human impacts on animals
Welfare and moral weights

Comments
2632

Topic contributions
15

Why do you think it was naive instead of a good bet that happened to not work out?

Another two:

  1. Rethink Priorities, but could be hard to evaluate. You'd also have to restrict funding to the animal department.
  2. THL UK, which fundraises separately from THL and gets limited funding from THL.

I had Perplexity do a review and compare PETA's report with Welfare Footprint's research here, and also critique and review the report Perplexity generated here. Summary from the second link:

Where Models Agree

 

Finding   Evidence
The 80 m² EFSA error identification is correctEFSA presentation slide confirms "Minimum area: For group >30 birds: 80 m²" alongside "Max stocking density: 4 laying hens/m²" — a total enclosure area, not per-bird
PETA's own HPAI data does contradict its thesisPETA white paper footnote 84 states 60% caged / 40% cage-free culls with ~45% cage-free flock share, confirming disproportionate caged impact​
KBF cherry-picking critique is well-supportedDanish study confirms 86% overall KBF prevalence across all systems; 50–98% in enriched cages
WFI's Open Philanthropy funding concern is valid and accurately statedEA Forum confirms $980K+ as of July 2022; additional $1.25M contract in 2023
WFI mortality meta-analysis publication in Nature is verifiedPublished in Scientific Reports (Nature) covering 6,040 flocks across 16 countries​
The report's overall assessment — PETA's paper is advocacy, WFI's is substantially more rigorous — is well-supportedPETA's paper is not peer-reviewed, contains verified factual error, and uses advocacy framing; WFI publishes parameters and invites sensitivity testing

I'm guessing this is on your radar, but I think it's worth checking basically every Coefficient Giving, Navigation Fund and EA Animal Welfare Fund grantee over the last ~2 years.

You could focus on those that received at least $X (e.g. $100K) if you're looking to filter quickly, but we should also be looking to get good orgs to consider more ambitious plans.

Albert Schweitzer Foundation

Anima International

Animal Activism Collective

Animal Advocacy Africa

Center for Responsible Seafood

Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade

Compassion in World Farming (all branches)

Crustacean Compassion

Eurogroup for Animals

Fish Welfare Initiative

International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW)

International Coalition for Animal Welfare (ICFAW)

L214

Obraz

Several more invertebrate agriculture uses here.

From 2000 to 2023, the number of species comprising 85% of aquaculture production grew from 14 to 22.

Does this account for the >1 trillion fish fry artificially propagated in China per year, a large share of which are probably fed live to mandarin fish? See my post here, and some (higher) estimates here. My sense is that these fish aren't counted in the FAO stats, because they're not slaughtered for food, and fish fed to mandarin fish are from a smaller number of species. From my post:

Li and Xia (2018) wrote “Almost all prey for mandarin fish is provided through artificial propagation”, and single out mud carp as the favourite feed fish, although others are reported elsewhere, e.g. FAO:

Common live foods for mandarin fish include mud carp (Cirrhinus molitorella), Wuchang fish (also called Chinese bream, Megalobrama amblycephala), silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), bighead carp (H. nobilis), grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idellus), crucian carp (Carassius carassius), common carp (Cyprinus carpio), stone moroko (Pseudorasbora parva) and other wild and trash fish. Wuchang fish fry is preferred at the start of food intake, then feeding bighead and silver carp follows. When body length reaches 25 cm, common and crucian carps are fed.

And “silver carp, bighead, grass carp, Wuchang fish or tilapia fry” (Kuanhong/FAO, 2009).

I agree with those benefits but there's no mention here of potential costs? Maybe you don't think those are significant? 

If we're assuming the post would be good quality, then I don't expect the costs (to me) to be significant, but I'm open to reasons otherwise. If the posts are sometimes low quality or repetitive, then AI could enable more of them, and that would be bad. I'd lean towards allowing 100% AI written posts and seeing what happens to the EA Forum, i.e. tracking the results and reassessing. 

Maybe the voting system, minimum karma to post, and throttling based on recent net negative karma posts/comments are enough to handle this without negatively affecting engagement. Banning 100% AI-written posts is a blunt tool, and it seems worth trying other things.

Its a completely different question but are you happy to receive 100% AI grant application as well?

I'd prefer human-written applications, because it can be hard to distinguish ~100% AI-written but primarily using the applicants' own ideas and reasoning from ~100% AI-generated, including writing, ideas and reasoning.[1] Grants are bets on the grantees' abilities, not just the project idea. However, I tend to also talk to applicants over calls or in person, and see their work in other ways.

I can imagine for a project for which communication by the applicant is an important part of the project's path to impact, if the application looks AI-written, I would ask them to resubmit or I would reject them, if and because the people the applicant would be communicating to dislike AI writing. This hasn't come up yet, though.

 

And would you be happy on your grantmaker end to allow your own AI to review that application or would you insist on reading it yourself

At this point, I'd insist on at least personally reading parts that are enough to be decisive one way or the other.

  1. ^

    Of course, this leaves another possibility (and others in between the different possibilities outlined so far, including no AI use): 100% of the ideas and reasoning come from AI, but the application is 100% written by the applicant. Hopefully by writing it themself, they've taken the time to understand what they're submitting, but it would still be better if the ideas came from the applicant.

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