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Reducing procrastination on altruistic projects:

I have often struggled to get started on projects that are particularly important to me so I thought I'd jot down a couple ways I handle procrastination.

1. Check if I actually want to do the project. Sometimes I like the idea of the project but don't actually want to do it (maybe I can post the idea here instead), or I'm conflicted because working on this task would conflict with my other values (can I change the plan so it meets my needs more fully?).
2. Check if I have an actually realistic plan. My subconscious is better at expected value calculations than I am and will not go forward with an unpleasant project that is doomed to fail. Sometimes I'm procrastinating because deep down I know this plan would never work.
3. Lower the stakes. If I think "I'm going to write the perfect blog post, convince everyone to become EA, and save hundreds of lives" that can easily turn into "I have to write the perfect blog post or else I might miss out on convincing someone and people will literally die." That mindset does not help me to produce my best work. A better approach is remember perfect is the enemy of done, and take things in stages - for example writing a first draft and sharing it with a friend for comments.

As we can see, average support for Near-termist causes declines with increases in engagement, while support for Longtermist and Meta causes increases.

I would love to see research into the direction of causality here. I think it's very easy to assume engagement drives the realisation of belief in longtermism, and much EA messaging supports this - eg Will's(?) statement that longtermism might be the biggest breakthrough of the EA movement. But I know many people for whom it seemed to run the other way - they lost interest over time in part because of the movement's obsession with replacing concrete short term value with (as they see it) motivated speculation.

Cool! Through data science I guess? 

Btw, I too find myself confused about this point by Benjamin_Todd and also am not sure exactly what's going on here.

On the other hand, many animal welfare non-profits still seem more likely to say that if they had more funding, they'd hire a bunch more people, and salaries also seem fairly low. I'm not sure exactly what's going on there.

I think Benjamin_Todd is saying that

1. There is  currently “room for funding” in (farmed) animal welfare, maybe specifically in talent and salaries
2. There was a reported overhang of funding in farmed animal welfare. Extrapolating from growth in Good Ventures, this overhang could even have increased
3. 1 and 2 seems to be a contradiction
    

Some quick thoughts of mine that may be low quality:

• I know some people in the farmed animal welfare space and funding is being thoughtfully deployed and there is  attention to talent and appropriate compensation.
• There’s a lot of actual on the ground, operational activity in animal welfare, compared to meta or longtermist cause areas. In my personal bias/perspective/worldview, this activity is inherently less cohesive and produces noise and this is normal. This noise described above can make it a little harder to get signal about funding gaps
• Increasing salaries or significantly improving the stream of talent are inherently delicate and slow processes involving changes in culture
• I think 2017 is a long time in the EA movement. It seems reasonable to get newer information about funding. Note that clearly 80,000 hours has hosted important leaders in farmed animal welfare since 2017.

I'm more sure that actual on the ground work, operations and implementation, is precious and can be hard to communicate or make visible.

CGD launched a Global Skills Partnership program to reduce brain drain and improve migration (https://gsp.cgdev.org/)

It would be interesting to think about this from the perspective of EA groups, where brain drain is quite common. Part of their solution is to offer training and recognized certifications to a broader group of people in the home country to increase the overall pool of talent.

I will probably add more thoughts in the coming days when I have time to read the case studies in more depth.

How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion.

For reference, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest charitable foundation in the world, holding $49.8 billion in assets.

No question about moral philosophy?

It sounds like you still had to slog through the drudgery at times, but the drudgery didn't last very long after you'd mastered the skills? And that's because mastering the skills let you quickly iterate and hop to new ideas?

The all-posts view [? · GW] gives excessive prominence to shortform posts: while for both ordinary posts and Wiki entries only titles are displayed, for shortform posts one gets to see the entire content. I suggest truncating such posts so as to show only the first line.

Yes, sorry I was thinking of meat substitutes broadly. I agree clean meat is more funding constrained than plant based meat, because it's further from commercialisation.