Every org has a tacit theory of change implied by what they are doing, some also have an explicit one (eg poor to middling examples: business consulting orgs). Sometimes the tacit one lines up with the explicit one, sometimes not. I think having an explicit one is what allows you to reason about and iterate towards one that is functional. I don’t know the specific theory of change that would be a good fit for what CFAR was trying to do, I was, at the time, bouncing off the lack of any explicit one and some felt sense of resistance towards moving in the direction of having one in 1 on 1 conversations. I think I was expecting clearer thoughts since I believed that CFAR was in the business of investigating effect sizes of various theories of change related to diagnosing and then unblocking people who could work on x-risk.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some.
This gets much stronger once you get big effect sizes that touch on core ways of navigating the world someone holds.
Every org has a tacit theory of change implied by what they are doing, some also have an explicit one (eg poor to middling examples: business consulting orgs). Sometimes the tacit one lines up with the explicit one, sometimes not. I think having an explicit one is what allows you to reason about and iterate towards one that is functional. I don’t know the specific theory of change that would be a good fit for what CFAR was trying to do, I was, at the time, bouncing off the lack of any explicit one and some felt sense of resistance towards moving in the direction of having one in 1 on 1 conversations. I think I was expecting clearer thoughts since I believed that CFAR was in the business of investigating effect sizes of various theories of change related to diagnosing and then unblocking people who could work on x-risk.
This gets much stronger once you get big effect sizes that touch on core ways of navigating the world someone holds.