CFAR update, and New CFAR workshops
Hi all! After about five years of hibernation and quietly getting our bearings,[1] CFAR will soon be running two pilot mainline workshops, and may run many more, depending how these go.
First, a minor name change request
We would like now to be called “A Center for Applied Rationality,” not “the Center for Applied Rationality.” Because we’d like to be visibly not trying to be the one canonical locus.[2]
Second, pilot workshops!
We have two, and are currently accepting applications / sign-ups:
Nov 5–9, in California;
Jan 21–25, near Austin, TX;
Apply here. (If you’re interested in the workshop but not sure you want to come, you’re welcome to apply; it can be a good way to talk to us about the workshops and get a sense of things.)
Third, a bit about what to expect if you come
The workshops will have a familiar form factor:
4.5 days (arrive Wednesday evening; depart Sunday night or Monday morning).
~25 participants, plus a few volunteers.5 instructors.
Immersive, on-site, with lots of conversation over meals and into the evenings.
I like this form factor, because:
Ideal length: Usually, people spend the first two days settling in, getting used to this particular set of strangers, etc. With a 4.5 day workshop, that still leaves us 2.5 days to have exceptionally present/earnest conversations. This length lets people settle into really deep conversational threads, without getting too exhausted.
Creates a local social context: Much of human thinking is social. We will let ourselves think a certain way when we have conversation-partners who are up for thinking that way with us, and when we can see a social context where many people are doing it in a way that seems healthy/happy.
It helps CFAR staff do gradient descent on how to make the social contexts we want, as well as on how to “teach” particular “rationality techniques.”
There’s a bunch of features we desire from the social context: people can make new, lasting friendships; can have earnest conversations about stuff they care about; can be and feel free, conscious, and in touch with what matters to them; can acquire lastingly more traction on their “Hamming Questions,” etc. Workshops are a good format for learning how to create particular social contexts, and how to help people become consciously empowered about particular aspects of being human. (I think.)
Many classic classes, with some new stuff and a subtly different tone:
Like CFAR’s previous workshops, the new workshops are jam-packed with considerably more content than most people expect from 4.5 days.
This includes:
1) Many “CFAR classics,” probably including: Inner Simulator, TAPs, Goal-Factoring, Focusing, Resolve Cycles, CoZE lab, and Hamming Questions. (There’s no need to look at this stuff before coming; I’m only linking in case you want to get an idea.)
2) A tone shift (vs the classic workshops) to more of a “rationality hobbyist convention, with visitors from many philosophical schools.” In both our newer (less polished) classes and our remakes of some classics, we’re emphasizing aspects of the human condition that some of us felt were underexplored in the Sequences and in previous CFAR workshops. Notably:
a) Pride in craftsmanship, and how this makes it easier to do good work;
b) Where people get “energy” from, for doing hard, uncertain, or socially courageous work.
c) Feedback loops, along the lines of David Deutsch’s falsificationism
d) Christopher Alexander’s design patterns, and the role of beauty, and of the interplay of parts and wholes, in functional structures;
e) Fredrich Hayek’s model of how knowledge is amalgamated across an economy (and how this depends on respecting natural property rights), taken as a metaphor for actions within a mind.
f) How keeping “surprise logs” about our own actions and reactions can help us become aware of more of ourselves over time
g) [Your idea goes here, maybe? Because you bring it and show it to us and others.]
If you want, you’ll get assistance locating the most fundamental moves in your own patterns of thinking, distilling these patterns into a thing you and others can practice consciously (even where they don’t match ours).
(Someone might ask: if there are varied schools of thought present, not all based in the Sequences, what makes it a “rationality” convention? My answer is that it’s a “rationality” convention because we care a lot about forming true beliefs, and about building large-scale models that make coherent, accurate predictions even when taken literally. Some people do talk about “auras” or “reincarnation” in ways that help them describe or fit some local pattern, but at the end of the day these things are not physically literal, and you get bad predictions if you think they are, and we want to keep our eye on that ball while geeking out about the full range of the human condition.)
3) A first two days packed with “content” (mostly classic material, with some new), followed by a (pilot, not yet honed) second half aimed at helping you integrate the skills with one another, with your prior skills, and with your everyday life. Our goal here is to get your CFAR-style/”5-minute-timer-style” skills to coexist with “tortoise skills,” with slow patterns of self-observation and of bringing things slowly to consciousness, and with whatever relationships and slow projects you care about.
There will also be nature walks, a chance to chill around a fire pit, or other unhurried time to just hang out.
Who might want to come / why might a person want to come?
You might like to come if any of these are true:
A big house full of rationality hobbyists geeking out for four days sounds like your idea of a good time;
You want to experience the classic CFAR workshop, and missed it last time around. (This one isn’t identical, but it has most of the best bits.)
You want to support and shape this particular attempt at a rationality scene (with your time, ideas, and workshop fee).
Who probably shouldn’t come?
These rationality workshops are not for everyone. In particular:
People who don’t want to be around people quite this many hours. (As in the past, most participants stay in a large house with many other staff and participants, take shared classes with many paired exercises, and socialize over meals and evenings. Sleeping arrangements are usually shared rooms. You can always step away for breaks, but it’s still a lot of people-time.)
People who have an object-level project they don’t want to step away from. (CFAR workshops might disrupt your progress in two ways: by being five days (plus transit and recovery time) where you can’t do much work on your normal stuff, and by doing a bunch of “thinking about thinking” that risks disrupting a productive groove.) If this is you, it may be better to wait until a retreat feels more appealing.
People with a history of mania, hypomania, or psychosis. (There’s some evidence that everything from meditation retreats to philosophy books to CFAR workshops may trigger mania or psychosis in folks with tendencies in that direction. If you’re vulnerable in this direction, it’s probably best to not come, or at least to talk to your psychiatrist before deciding.) (For related reasons, please do not bring cannabis or other recreational drugs to a workshop, regardless of your personal risk factors; or at minimum don’t bring it to share.)
People who hate it when folks who don’t understand them try to tell them how to think anyhow. (We try not to be blindly full of ourselves, but we don’t always succeed.)
Cost:
We want the workshop fees to cover the marginal cost to CFAR of running these workshops, and a little bit also of the “standing costs” of running an organization (trying curriculum beforehand on volunteers so we can refine it, etc). We are therefore charging:
$5,000 if you make over $170k/year (without dependents; somewhat higher with dependents).[3]
Sliding scale amounts between $2,000 and $5,000 depending on your income.
$2,000 if you’re under 25, or make less than $75k/year.
If you can’t afford $2k and you believe you’ll bring a lot to the workshop, you’re welcome to apply for financial aid and we’ll see what we can do. Likewise if you really don’t want to put in the amount the sliding scale would demand, and your presence would add substantial value, you’re also welcome to apply for financial aid, and we will consider it.
Why this cost:
The above includes room and board. Running and developing CFAR workshops costs us quite a bit; charging at this level should allow us to roughly break even, so we can keep doing this sustainably. I don’t necessarily claim our classes will be worth it to you, although I do think some will get much value from coming. (If you come and, two weeks after returning home, you think your experiences at the workshop haven’t digested into something you find worth it, you can request a refund if you like – CFAR offered this historically, and we intend to keep that part.)
(We are working with an all-very-part-time staff, and plan to keep doing it this way, as I now suspect “doing very-part-time curriculum development and teaching for CFAR” can be healthy, but needs to be mixed with other stuff. (Eliezer said this first, but I didn’t believe him.) This decreases total costs some, but it’s still expensive.)
How did we prepare these workshops? And the workshops’ epistemic status.
Historical-CFAR (2012-2020) ran about sixty four-day (or longer) retreats of various kinds, and did its best to improve them by gradient-descent. We also thought hard, tried things informally in smaller settings, read stuff from others who’d tried stuff, and learned especially from Eliezer’s Sequences/R:AZ.
These latest workshops came from that heritage, plus me having something of an existential crisis in 2020[4] (and reading Hayek, Christopher Alexander, and others, and playing around), and other instructors having their own experiences. We’ve been doing some playing around with these things (different ones of us, in different contexts), but much less so far than on the old stuff – more like CFAR workshops of 2012/2013 in that way.
What alternatives are there to coming to a workshop?
We here at CFAR believe in goal factoring (sometimes).
If your reason for considering coming to a workshop is that you’d like to boost a “rationality movement” in some form, you might also consider:
Starting or supporting a local meetup or rationality practice group
Contributing to online rationality discussions;
Donating financially to Lightcone (which TBC is not CFAR).
If your reason for considering coming is that you’d like a retreat-style break from your daily life, or a chance to reflect, you might also consider:
Organizing a camping trip or retreat with friends, perhaps one where you try techniques from the CFAR handbook, or attempt earnest discussions about life.
If your reason is that you’d like to get better at forming true beliefs, or achieving stuff, you might consider:
Making a list of what exactly you’d like to get better at, and doing written weekly/monthly/quarterly reviews about how things are progressing, and what habits/TAPs you might want to try toward progressing these further, perhaps with a bit of coaching mixed in from some rationalist who you think could help.
I think the CFAR retreat is on the pareto frontier for this kind of thing, from my POV. But of course, opinions vary.
Some unsolved puzzles, in case you have helpful comments:
Puzzle: How to get enough “grounding data,” as people tinker with their own mental patterns
One of the healthiest things about Burning Man, IMO, is that at the same time that people are messing around with personal identity and sex and drugs (not necessarily healthy), many of them are also trying to eg repair complicated electronics for art pieces in the middle of the desert without spare parts (healthy; exposes their new mental postures to many “is this working?” checks that’re grounded in the physical world).
At CFAR workshops, people often become conscious of new ways their minds can work, and new things they can try. But we don’t have enough “and now I’ll try to repair my beautiful electronic sculpture, which I need to do right now because the windstorm just blew it all apart, and which will incidentally give me a bunch of real-world grounding” mixed in.
I’d love suggestions here.
Puzzle: How to help people become, or at least stay, “intact,” in several ways
There are several features of “humans in human-traditional contexts, who haven’t tried to mess with their functioning with ‘techniques’” that I admire and would love to help people boost (if I knew how, and if people wanted this), or that I’d at least like to avoid eroding much.
Among these:
“Mental grip strength”: the ability to try really hard on something, or to keep noticing that something is awful if it is awful, rather than quickly reorienting to some easier state.
“Organism-level wholeness”: many parts of the psyche (including ones I have no conscious handle on) are in sync with one another.
“Living in a full-color world, full of normal human caring, and connected to ancestral humanity. A world that is stable, and that one is not about to dissociate out of.”
(Many people today, especially high-level people in the bay area, seem to me sort of… abstract, dissociated, cobbled-together-on-purpose-via-conscious-understanding-of-algorithms compared to the people in older books and movies. I’d like more of the normal/historical human thing.)
Puzzle: What data to collect, or how to otherwise see more of what’s happening
This one is a general. But practical suggestions for what to ask people about (or what data to otherwise collect) so as to discern how they’re doing, what impact we’re having, etc. are appreciated.
Thanks for reading!
- ^
- ^
ETA: except that as several people pointed out post posting, this is sometimes grammatically inconvenient or requiring of mental effort. So, new request: please do this when it’s easy, but feel free to say “the” when needed for clarity/ease. And we’ll keep thinking on names.
- ^
For context, CFAR charged $3900 from 2012 to 2020; $3900 when we started is roughly $5500 today according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- ^
Briefly: I became worried that “strategies like the Democrats’ strategy for how people should sync up informationally” for getting lots of people to sync up were predictably certain kinds of useless, and that there was too much of that in my efforts with CFAR and with recruitment for MIRI. I made an attempt to write about this in Narrative Syncing and in My low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn’t get farther, although I’m not satisfied with either piece. (I also think fear and urgency helped create tricky dynamics; from my POV I addressed some of this in What should you change in response to an “emergency”? And AI risk.)
Just noting for the audience that I would not recommend this, and would strongly discourage my friends and family members from going to it. There’s sort of nothing I can do about the fact that this is inherently rude, and clashes with the largely-positive tone of all the other discussion, but it feels rather important to represent this fact, especially as someone with slightly more context and grounded understanding than most.
(I have had zero interaction with CFAR since the end of my three years working there in 2019 and can make no confident predictions about the object-level experience, but I do not trust and indeed am substantially wary of the motives, methods, and competence of (some members of) the team creating the experience. I would not want anyone I love to put themselves in a vulnerable state under the care of (some of) these particular people, as I have justified reason to believe that duty-of-care will not be reliably discharged. I’ll note that when plans for something like this were first proposed circa 2021, I directly told at least one of the people I’m concerned about that I thought they should absolutely not participate in anything like this, and that I believed they would cause harm by doing so (because they had repeatedly caused harm in the past) and should leave the project to others.)
Note also that the CFAR handbook exists and is free to all.
Can you say more about why you think duty-of-care will not be executed responsibly? There’s probably a good reason why you didn’t spell it out, so I don’t expect an answer to the question. As someone without a lot of context, I am still curious!
Duncan was very unhappy with his experience and his treatment as a CFAR employee and his interactions with Anna Salamon in particular, including being pressured into doing things against his better judgment. If he prefers not to go into details, I’ll respect his wishes, but after following him for a while I’ve got somewhat of a handle on what happened.
I think for reasons of not needlessly rending the social fabric, I don’t want to be more specific. I feel the need to register the warning, and I’m happy with people weighting or discounting it based on how much they trust my assessments generally, including the context that I worked at CFAR for three years and overlapped with much of the present staff.
What’s the vulnerable state you’re refering to here? Staying on site?
Thinking about thinking, tinkering with your mental and emotional algorithms, shaking up your worldview, adopting new perspectives and new strategies, spending a lot of time zeroing in and ruminating on your problems and goals and values and considering them in contact with other people and with suggestions about how to see them and think of them and change them. Setting aside your normal ways of doing things.
Becoming more mud, in other words.
This is already inherently vulnerable, but it gets moreso when you’re doing it in an isolated retreat context surrounded by other people for multiple days in which there is a clear status differential between the instructors and the participants.
There are ways to do this that are more responsible and careful, and there are ways to do this that are less responsible and careful. Separately, a person or group can have the intent to do such a thing responsibly and carefully, and this is not the same as being able to do this responsibly and carefully.
(If you’ve seen a person or group try for X and fail repeatedly in multiple novel ways despite multiple rounds of figuring out what went wrong and fixing it in each specific case, it’s wise to be wary of their latest attempt at X. Sometimes people exhibit a curiously robust capacity to keep generating brand-new ways to get X wrong, and my desire to register a warning here is partially downstream of my belief that something like that is true, here.)
There seems to be a profound lack of curiosity about why rationalist-y things tend to cause psychosis. It is NOT NORMAL for things to just sometimes cause psychosis, whoopsie! (Sorry to pick on you Anna, you are at least trying to mitigate this risk here which is more than I can say for the community at large.)
Psychosis isn’t just some random thing
(like mania kind of is, in this context), it is a state where one is no longer able to determine what is presently real, and what is not. Rationality is, in large part, about becoming better at determining what is real (even in hard cases). It should be a Halt. Melt. Catch Fire. moment when your rationality workshop is somehow regularly crashing people’s easy-mode epistemics! To first-order, you should expect a successful rationality workshop to help people prone to psychosis.It would be one thing if these rationality techniques were extremely effective such that it was plausibly a trade-off worth making. But as far as I can tell, this is not the case, and the people who have substantially leveled-up in “rationality” have done it just by spending an order-of-magnitude more time working specifically on this. The main benefit of the workshops seems to me to have been the networking aspect. It’s pretty easy to run networking events without causing psychosis.
I’ve spent probably 200 hours trying to understand stuff near here, in various ways, across the last 15 years. I don’t have a lack of curiosity about it.
(Partly this is because for awhile, many people across the greater rationalist community who seemed a bit psychotic or manic, or more rarely full-blown psychotic/manic, were people who someone would reach out to me about. Partly it’s because CFAR had an early experience with a CFAR participant who had a full-blown manic episode after coming to a workshop, and I and we as a staff responded to this by trying to up our game at noticing warning signs of such. Partly it’s because I’ve somehow been curious about what’s up with psychosis since I was a teen, after a friend’s experience with psychosis and psychiatry.)
People who run all kinds of psychological workshops or meditation retreats tell me that their workshops can occasionally trigger manic or psychotic states in folks with a predisposition in that direction. (Eg Landmark, several different kinds of meditation, some person I talked to at a conference who did random self-help stuff). My high school friend was told by her psychiatrist not to read philosophy books, because allegedly philosophy books are a common psychosis trigger. Sudden major life changes, particularly negative ones but sometimes also positive ones, can trigger mania or psychosis. Psychedelics, including cannabis, can also trigger mania and psychosis. I suspect there’s a common thread running through all of this, where mania/psychosis often happens when the mind tries to reorganize, plus or minus some other factors I don’t understand well.
People also tell me autistic spectrum folks have psychotic episodes more often. Autistic spectrum seems common in the rationalist community.
In terms of how risky CFAR workshops in particular are (I’m sharing data here, not trying to argue that they are or aren’t): about 1800 people have attended 4.5-day or longer events with us. From this set, I am aware of two full-blown manic or psychotic episodes happening at or shortly after a workshop: one from the early participant I mentioned above, and one from someone in ~2018-ish. The later person tried cannabis during “comfort zone exploration,” which they got from another participant without us knowing, which seemed to set off the episode. If I take as a “control group” people who had already been accepted to a CFAR workshop, and had committed to attending but had not yet actually attended: there was one manic or psychotic episode I know of in that group (a person who canceled their participation and told us this was because of mania/psychosis). The early participant had a previous milder psychosis-like episode after reading the Sequences, a couple years before he attended CFAR; the later participant had a previous milder maybe-episode in response to life stresses. I do think we should try to exercise care here.
(In terms of why I’m talking about “mania or psychosis” together, instead of separating these out: it turns out I’m fairly accurate at predicting when a psychiatrist will say that a person has either mania or psychosis, but am no better than chance at predicting which of these things a psychiatrist will say a given person has. Also most of the first aid seems similar: if you have mild signs of mania or psychosis, maybe: avoid recreational drugs, including alcohol and coffee; get sleep if at all possible; do normal grounding things such as gardening or the dishes, rather than “heady” or agitating things such as math or philosophy or politics; remember that now is not the only time to ever solve the thing one is currently upset about; don’t drive cars or make major decisions; maybe see a psychiatrist; maybe reach out to loved ones and dial back the complexities of life for a little bit. So I use the courser-grained concept “mania/psychosis.”)
That’s good to hear. Any insights?
Yeah, there’s something fucked up about meditation communities too. And let’s not forget Vassar/Vassarites.
I think the through-line has to do with drastic modification of self-image, which helps explain the AI cases too (or higher rate in trans). It seems to be a lot worse if this modification was pushed on them to any degree.
(I’m not saying that modification of self-image is categorically bad. It’s necessary as your actual self changes, and most people probably have false beliefs here (maybe even all conscious experience according to some). But be careful. Please!)
I’m not really swayed by arguments that our rough neurotype is just more prone to this (almost certainly true), since the inciting incident—when it’s not just drugs—usually seems to be some sort of rationality content or technique. People are prone to dying, but we don’t just shrug and say “damn that’s crazy” when something causes someone to die. There should be a post-mortem analysis, and sign-post warnings. Maybe you’ve been diligent about this, but the community-at-large seems to have a missing mood here. More public boggling would have been nice.
Thanks for sharing the data. It’s plausible to me that CFAR isn’t particularly bad here, but the prevalence in the community seems extremely high compared to say, my childhood Mormon ward (one case that I know of, did psychedelics which is a no-no). This is something that’s been bothering me about the community in general for years, and your post was the unlucky one that inspired me to say something[1] because the psychosis part had the feeling of the missing mood I’m trying to point at.
And fair point re. mania/psychosis.
Why not earlier? For better-or-worse (worse), having a model I’m happy with seems to be a prerequisite to taking action for me. That only happened about a month ago, while researching the AI psychosis stuff.
I agree more community interest would be good here; and I appreciate you writing about it; although I also feel grudging because I don’t want this to take up all the attention under my post about new pilot CFAR workshops. Any chance you’d be up for heading with me to your shortform or to open thread or [making a top-level post yourself as a locus for discussion] or something? I’ll follow and discuss there. And we can link to it here.
I would off the top of my head guess the Mormons are unusually good at avoiding psychotic episodes, in addition to the rationality community being unusually bad for this; and I agree each situation deserves a postmortem etc.
Edited to add: Adele and I are now talking on Adele’s shortform if anyone would like to join there.
If anyone later wants to post brief take-aways or points they’re particularly interested in back here, I don’t object to that, I just don’t want there to be a large amount of long-winded discussion on it here.
I really enjoyed CFAR ten years ago, it was what finally got me to take action and finally start properly studying how to contribute to AI capabilities. I now think that was a first-order bad thing for it to have done, and it’s unclear whether my response to realizing that was bad is remotely close to undoing the p(doom|action)-p(doom|counterfactual inaction) change. I think CFAR has promising ideas for how to think well but I generally think most ways of making people better end up mostly impacting the world by amplifying AI capabilities researchers who are least doom avoidant in their approach, and it’s not clear to me how to prevent that given that CFAR was already at the time designed to get people to think about consequences.
One other note is that CFAR has been holding some online test sessions recently while we develop new content for these workshops (and beyond!) -- if you’re interested in checking out some of what we’ve been working on (potentially in a very unpolished form), you can sign up here to be on the test session mailing list!
TBC, these test sessions are a good place to volunteer an hour of your time if you want to help us with curriculum development (and we appreciate it!); but I think they’re a lot worse than what the workshop will be like, and don’t provide a very good idea of it; we are often eg interviewing people about their cognitive patterns, trying stuff we haven’t tried before that mostly then does belly-flops, etc.
At workshops, IME, there’s somehow a magic that comes from having left behind “work mode” and entering “retreat mode,” where you and everyone you’re seeing in person all have space at once for thinking through things freshly, and also where there’s a critical mass of seeing new ways to make progress on bits of peoples’ lives that they’d assumed “just have to be this way,” such that people begin to look around with hope, and to notice and try things.
I’m really excited to hear this, and wish you luck :)
My thinking benefited a lot from hanging around CFAR workshops, so for whatever it’s worth I do recommend attending them; my guess is that most people who like reading LessWrong but haven’t tried attending a workshop would come away glad they did.
I benefited greatly from my CFAR experience, as a participant, a volunteer mentor, and as full-time staff.
The main early benefit was a boost to my self-confidence and agency, the realization that I could endlessly work to resolve my own problems (physical, emotional, and mental) and that there is no end to self-improvement and overcoming one’s own obstacles. I was deeply inspired by CFAR instructors as role models.
As a mentor, I realized I could also help others with their problems, and often this meant getting out of the way and simply acting as a mirror.
As staff, I gained some much-needed common sense and the ability to work with physical objects and places. I learned to merge with tools and the venue itself, in order to do operations. I became better at time (like being on time and learning how long it takes to do things). I learned to value my voice and became more openly disagreeable. And a lot more that I won’t list.
I believe I also gained deep insights and new ways of being that bolstered my path of truth-seeking with CFAR, which then led me to even clearer truth-seeking paths.
If there’s a piece of curriculum that I think would be a helpful addition, it’s how to escape all forms of victim mentality. All the benefit of a place like CFAR seems like it could come crashing down with victim mentality in the water. The “drama triangle” is a helpful framework here.
FWIW, I tried this for a bit and failed. Saying “a Center for Applied Rationality” just sounds nonsensical and every time I have considered using it in conversation I predicted that I would just get weird blank stares.
I am planning to continue calling it “the Center for Applied Rationality” as a result (and also am kind of annoyed about what reads to me as basically non-grammatical language on the website and other places, plus a request to non-standard language that I think would be reliably embarrassing when trying to use it in conversation).
My guess is if you want to change the usage here, you’ll have to change the name properly.
“A Center for Applied Rationality” works as a tagline but not as a name
You’re right. Oops!
I added a footnote above modifying our request to “when it’s easy/convenient.” Eg as mattmacdermott notes below, we can at least use it as a tagline (“Signed, Anna from A Center for …”).
The problem is that organizations generally do not include the article used to refer to them in their names. For example, the name of the Council on Foreign Relations is not ‘The Council on Foreign Relations’, but ‘Council on Foreign Relations’. For this reason, one should always use the definite article ‘the’ to refer to CFAR, because one’s intention is to refer to the entity so named. Saying “a Center for Applied Rationality” would invite questions like, “Wait! Are there other orgs also called ‘Center for Applied Rationality’?”
Alternatively, you could change ‘Center for Applied Rationality’ to ‘A Center for Applied Rationality’, but this would also be very strange. As mentioned, entities do not generally include the article as part of their names, but when they do, it is, to my knowledge, always the definite article (e.g., The New York Times).
My humble advice is to drop this idea. You can communicate that you are not trying to be the one canonical org on this topic in other ways.
I think even that signature tagline version does not work so well, as people who do not know it would possibly not understand that you are referring to a specific organization. It would at least need to be
“Anna from
CFAR—a center for …”
(CFAR’s website is several years out of date, so please ignore it for now; I’ll have it up-to-date-ish in a day or two.)
I have now updated the website, so feel free to stop ignoring it. (There are still some changes we’re planning to make sometime in the next month or so, eg adding an FAQ and more staff book picks and the ability to take coaching clients. But the current website should be accurate, if a bit spartan. If you notice something wrong on it, we do want to know.)
I’ll try to make sure I’m running a D&D.Sci scenario over both of the spans you mentioned: data-science-y attendants would get a chance to test their data-science-y skills against small but tricky problems with knowable right answers, and non-data-science-y attendants would probably still get something out of spectating (especially if they make a point of trying to predict which participants are closest to said right answer).
(. . . and if anyone else has some kind of [inference|decision]-centric moderately-but-not-excessively-demanding public puzzle/challenge they’ve been meaning to run, those spans look like the time to do it.)
Thanks; I appreciate this thought and offer! I’m not sure how well “internet things” can co-exist with the sort of in-person “be fully present” thing that seems to help workshops do their magic, but, per CFAR’s recommendations, I’m gonna set a 5-minute timer later today and think on the best way to do it before declaring it impossible :)
Fwiw, the scenarios don’t have to be solved collaboratively online, and in fact most players play most of them solo. For that matter, they don’t need internet access: would-be players could make sure they have the problem description & the dataset & their favorite analysis tools downloaded, then cut the wifi.
(. . . unless “be fully present” rules out laptops too, in which case yeah nvm.)
Would it work from print-outs?
It could, for a game with an unusually small & clean dataset (I’m thinking in particular of On The Construction Of Impossible Structures and How The Grinch Pessimized Christmas) . . . but realistically a LWer solving a problem like that on paper would spend the entire time lamenting that they weren’t using a computer, which doesn’t seem like a mental state conducive to personal growth. So nvm.
(I do have other thoughts on potential epistemic grounding activities but they’re all obvious: board games, 2-4-6 tests[1], pub quizzes with confidence intervals attached, etc.)
With different rules than the original 2-4-6 test, obviously.
This was pleasant to read! You seem to be shifting toward some conservative vibes (in the sense of appreciating the nice things about the past, not in the sense of the Republican party).
To me it feels like there’s a bit of tension between doing lots of purely mental exercises, like Hamming questions, and trying to be more “whole”. One idea I have is that you become more “whole” by physically doing stuff while having the right kind of focus. But it’s a bit tricky to explain what it feels like. I’ll try...
For example, when drawing I can easily get into overthinking; but if I draw a quick sketch with my eyes closed, just from visual imagination, it frees me up. Or when playing an instrument, I can easily get into overthinking; but when playing with a metronome, or matching tones with a recording, I get into flow and it feels like improving and relaxing at the same time. Or to take a silly example, I’ve found that running makes me tense, but skipping (not with a rope, just skipping along the street for a bit) is a happy thing and I feel good afterward. So maybe this feeling that you’re looking for isn’t a mind thing, but a mind-body connection thing.
Thanks; I appreciate this thought, particularly the examples bit.
For grounding data, I keep thinking of Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford. Doing some kind of wood-carving or pottery or painting or sketching animals on nature walks, or something like that seems well-advised. Also works as a toy problem to practice new skills on.
Congratulations!
I really welcome the announcement that CFAR is restarting. When I attended a workshop, I liked the participants, the lecturers, the atmosphere, and the impact of committing time to work on problems that participants had previously procrastinated. That said, a bunch of thoughts and questions:
I am not sure whether there is really some specific “rationality magic” about these workshops. The CFAR technique collection contains cool techniques, but it does not really feel that different from what you might do in time-management/micro-habits/GTD/whatever workshop combined with some things that seem like group coaching, psychological process consulting or things that at least feel a little woo.
There might be a specific group dynamic going on in these workshops that has to do with the commitment atmosphere, self-expectations, selection effects, the payment of $ 5000. This may get some people to become productive or whatever, but I assume it can also be unhealthy to others (note that not all unhealthy developments are on the level of psychosis or mania or whatever).
I attended a free workshop in Prague in 2022. So maybe some of the effects were different there. Nonetheless, I would like to know what insights you generated with those workshops (assuming that that was evaluated systematically). I think they were held for generating data.
It seems positive that “circling” is not mentioned as a “CFAR classic”.
CFAR now has an X.com account, https://x.com/CFARonX. If you happen to be up for following us on there, it might help convince X.com that we’re an actual organization and not a spambot, which would be nice for us.
(Weirdly, we “upgraded” to a paid account and it responded to this by freezing our ability to edit our profile photo or handle until verified, which I wish I’d anticipated.)
currently when I click that link I get “Page not found”
The period had become part of the URL. I have fixed it.
Thanks; fixed.