and relatedly at some point I got a doomy sense about CFAR after inquiring with various people and not being able to get a sense of a theory of change or a process that could converge to a theory of change for being able to diagnose this and other obstacles.
Can you say a bit more about what kind of a “theory of change” you’d want to see at CFAR, and why/how? I still don’t quite follow this point.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some. This might’ve been because a lot of the “bugs” people tackled at the workshop were more like “technical barriers,” and less like what Kenzi used to call “load-bearing bugs.” Or maybe I missed a lot of it, or maybe … not sure.
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.
Can you say a bit more about what kind of a “theory of change” you’d want to see at CFAR, and why/how? I still don’t quite follow this point.
Weirdly, we encountered “behaviors consistent with wanting fancy indirect excuses to not change” less than I might’ve expected, though still some. This might’ve been because a lot of the “bugs” people tackled at the workshop were more like “technical barriers,” and less like what Kenzi used to call “load-bearing bugs.” Or maybe I missed a lot of it, or maybe … not sure.
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.