CFAR is not defunct. I am at a workshop right now with Jack and Vaniver (who also work with CFAR), and 7 other people, who are mostly adjunct CFAR instructors (aka, people who are skilled enough to run CFAR classes if they want, and who’ve trained with us some, but who usually do only very few hours of CFAR-esque work in a typical year), trying things out. Dan Keys is the fourth person who is also on CFAR’s “core staff” (though we are all part-time hourly); there’s also a number of other adjunct instructors.
Like some at MIRI, I’ve been taking something of a sabbatical year, loosely speaking. That is, I’ve been looking at the word trying to understand its joints. For me this sometimes involves running small experimental workshops, e.g. to try to see a thing with a group of people helping and geeking out about it together. It doesn’t so far involve trying to do anything at scale.
There are no super-secret projects at CFAR. I suppose I might not say if there were, but I at least wouldn’t say this.
We haven’t run mainlines in awhile. Irena (who is an adjunct CFAR instructor, and also upstairs in the venue asleep right now) keeps saying she may run one in Prague; if so, I and some others may fly in to help. Davis keeps saying he may co-organize one in Berkeley, in which case I’ll probably help also, but it’s not quite clear. If someone wants one and wants to co-organize, I may be down in general, but I don’t quite have the fire to generate those on my own right now—there may be people who would like to attend a CFAR workshop (okay, I know there are at least some), but running one isn’t quite the thing that feels like it’ll help me unravel the things I’m trying to understand, and also I don’t quite have the stomach for it in some ways, although I’m glad that the people who attended got to attend so this is a bit of a muddy thing to express well. It’s possible the workshop we’re currently experimenting in upstairs may lead to a revised mainline at some point, and one my heart could be more solidly in, but that “scale this up to a mainline” outcome is not a thing we’re driving at especially hard.
CFAR’s internal structure lately involves a “telos committee” who authorizes the allocation of funds internally by checking that the individual (from within CFAR’s “core team” or CFAR’s adjunct instructors / outside collaborators) has “telos” for the thing they want to do (and tries to get out of the way and let people do things they have “telos” for, without them needing to persuade others much). I like how this has been going. It is pretty low-key, though. It is plausible to me that we had to wind down before we can build freshly. We wound things down by ceasing to do anything that nobody had “telos” for (even things that were traditional, such as mainlines). Sort of a theory that things would be easier to see, or at minimum we’d have more slack with which to see, if there wasn’t any of that sort of clutter around.
I would not advise anyone wishing to solve human rationality, or to do anything else awesome, to refrain from attempting said awesome thing on the theory that we or anyone else has that covered. Such thinking always seemed insane to me; if it is more transparently insane now, that seems good. In hindsight, I wish we had chosen a more local name than the “Center for Applied Rationality” (such as “A Center for Applied Rationality” or “some random group in Berkeley who are taking a go at some applied rationality stuff while also having some more local goals about supporting MIRI’s staffing needs, and should totally not be occupying the entire namespace here”). We do not have a super secret rationality sauce such that people attempting such a thing from outside CFAR are at a bad disadvantage, or anything like that. If you want to try and want to make sure we don’t know something you’re missing first, I’m probably happy to talk. Others might be too but I can’t speak for them.
In terms of whether there is some interesting thing we discovered that caused us to abandon e.g. the mainline: I can’t speak for more than myself here either. But for my own take, I think we ran to some extent into the same problem that something-like-every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60′s or so has run into, which e.g. the documentary (read: 4-hour somewhat intense propaganda film) Century of the Self is a pretty good introduction to. I separately or also think the old mainline workshops provided a pretty good amount of real value to a lot of people, both directly (via the way folks encountered the workshop) and via networks (by introducing a bunch of people to each other who then hit it off and had a good time and good collaborations later). But there’s a thing near “self-help” that I’ll be trying to dodge in later iterations of mainline-esque workshops, if there are later iterations. I think. If you like, you can think with some accuracy of the small workshop we’re running this week, and its predecessor workshop a couple months ago, as experiments toward having a workshop where people stay outward-directed (stay focused on inquiring into outside things, or building stuff, or otherwise staring at the world outside their own heads) rather than focusing on e.g. acquiring “rationality habits” that involve a conforming of one’s own habits/internal mental states with some premade plan.
The above is somewhat scattered; feel free to ask more questions.
You refer to “the same problem that something like every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60s has run into”, but then don’t say what that problem is (beyond gesturing to a “4-hour-long propaganda film”).
I can think of a number of possible problems that all such movements might have run into (or might credibly be thought to have run into) but it’s not obvious to me which of them, if any, you’re referring to.
Could you either clarify or be explicit that you intended not to say explicitly what you meant? Thanks!
[EDITED to fix a misquotation that made it look like Anna wrote something ungrammatical; sorry]
Sorry. I don’t have a good short description of the problem, and so did not try to say explicitly what I meant. Instead I tried to refer to a 4-hour film, “Century of the self,” as trying to describe the same problem.
I may come back later with an attempted description, probably not a good one.
Thanks. I am, realistically, not going to watch four hours of propaganda (assuming your description of it is accurate!) in the hope of figuring out what you meant, so in the hope that you will come back and have at least a sketchy try at it I’ll list my leading hypotheses so you have something concrete to point at and say “no, not that” about.
It turns out that actually it’s incredibly difficult to improve any of the things that actually stop people fulfilling what it seems should be their potential; whatever is getting in the way isn’t very fixable by training.
“Every cause wants to be a cult”, and self-help-y causes are particularly vulnerable to this and tend to get dangerously culty dangerously quickly.
Regardless of what’s happening to the cause as a whole, there are dangerously many opportunities for individuals to behave badly and ruin things for everyone.
In this space it is difficult to distinguish effective organizations from ineffective ones, and/or responsible ones from cultish/abusive ones, which means that if you’re trying to run an effective, responsible one you’re liable to find that your potential clients get seduced by the ineffective irresponsible ones that put more of their efforts into marketing.
In this space it is difficult to distinguish effective from ineffective interventions, which means that individuals and organizations are at risk of drifting into unfalsifiable woo.
As someone who has watched “Century of the Self” I’d guess it’s more along the lines of
What people want is not what they need. People don’t need much help to self-improve in ways which are already consonant with their natural desires and self-image. So any safe and effective self-improvement program would be a nonstarter in the free market because it would immediately repel the very people who could benefit from it.
Fair enough. FWIW, I found the movie good / full of useful anecdata for piecing together a puzzle that I personally care a lot about, and so found it rewarded my four hours, but our interests are probably pretty different and I know plenty who would find it empty and annoying.
On reflection, I shouldn’t have written my paragraph the way I did in my parent comment; I am not sure what trouble something-like-every self-help thingy has run into, I just suspect there’re threads in common based on how things look. I might be wrong about it.
Still, I wrote up my take on some of the hypotheses you listed (I appreciate that you took the trouble to list them; thanks!), and my take in general as to why we didn’t get a more formidable art of rationality. Many of the factors I list remind me of my guesses at a bunch of stuff that also happened to other self-help groups and the “human potential movement” and so on, but I haven’t researched those well and might be wrong. My take is long-winded, so I posted it blog-post style. I’d love your/others thoughts if you have them.
Seconding gjm’s reply, and wondering what can possibly be so difficult to talk about that even a 4-hour film can only be an introduction? I watched a few 20-second snippets scattered over its whole length (since this is an Adam Curtis film, that is all that is needed), and I am sceptical that the line that he draws through a century of history corresponds to a load-bearing rope in reality.
I suspect you should update the website with some of this? At the very least copying the above comment into a 2022 updates blog post.
The message ‘CFAR did some awesome things that we’re really proud of, now we’re considering pivoting to something else, more details to follow’ would be a lot better than the implicit message you may be sending currently ‘nobody is updating this website, the CFAR team lost interest and it’s not clear what the plan is or who’s in charge anymore’
I used to be in-practice orienting to trying to help MIRI with recruiting. (Not, mostly, to trying to develop an art of human rationality, though there was some of that.)
MIRI is mostly not recruiting, or at least not in the way it used to be for the research programs it discontinued, so that is no longer a viable model for impact, which if you like you could reasonably accurately see as a cause of why I personally have been primarily trying to understand the world and to look for joints, rather than primarily trying to run mainlines at scale.
I do not think I’ve given up in any important sense, and I do not personally think CFAR has given up in any important sense either, although one of the strengths of our community has always been its disagreeableness, and the amount of scaling down and changing activities and such is enough that I will not think someone necessarily uninformed if they say the opposite.
My guess is actually that we’ll be less focused on AI or other narrow interventions, and more focused on something sort of like “human rationality broadly” (without “rationality” necessarily being quite the central thing—maybe more like: “sanity” or “ability to build and inquire and be sane and conscious and to stay able to care”). (“Rationality” in the sense of the “lens that sees its own flaws” is an amazing goal, but may have some more basic things as prereqs / necessary context, so may need to have a home as part of a larger goal.) But it’s hard to say.
We are open to hiring new people. Message me if you’re interested. If you come to CFAR, you’ll have a lot of freedom to do things you personally have telos to do, whether or not the rest of us fully see it; and you may be able to get some cool collaborations with us or others in our orbit, although we are few at the moment and also that part depends on whether whoever else sees sense in your project. Also, we have a great venue.
I think for a long time CFAR was trying, though maybe not in a very smart/calibrated/wise/accurate way, to have public relationship with “the rationality community” along the lines of “we will attempt this project that you guys care about; and you guys may want to collaborate with us on that.” (Details varied by year; I think at the beginning something like this was more intended, accurate, and sincere, but after awhile it was more like accumulated branding we didn’t mean but didn’t update.)
I think at the moment we are not trying to take on any public mantles, including not that one.
This is probably also part of what’s up with us not prioritizing more public communication about CFAR, though I and I think others are happy to discuss what’s going on, but it’s not “here is a thing we’re doing, please believe in it’s potential.”
I honestly don’t really get why the “telos committee” is an overall good idea (though there may be some value in experimenting with that sort of thing)—intuitively, a large portion of extremely valuable projects are going to be boring, and the sort of thing that people are going to feel “burnt out” on a large portion of the time. Shutting down projects that don’t feel like saving the world probably doesn’t select well for projects that are maximilly effective. Might just be misunderstanding what you mean here, of course.
I would not advise anyone wishing to solve human rationality, or to do anything else awesome, to refrain from attempting said awesome thing on the theory that we or anyone else has that covered.
As someone who worked for CFAR for a couple years and then quit at the beginning of 2021: In addition to this advice, I would also advise that anyone wishing to gain basic skill in rationality, teaching, and workshop running, because they do not yet feel ready to solve human rationality or do anything else awesome, should pursue some strategy other than “I will work for CFAR while I level up and maybe eventually become a real cool instructory person capable of Impact”. I think that CFAR is unusually likely to be bad for you. I hope you will learn to be awesome somewhere else instead.
If you want to try and want to make sure we don’t know something you’re missing first, I’m probably happy to talk.
This is great to hear. The Guild of the ROSE is striving to teach rationality to the layperson, and are excited to carry on the torch you folks lit. We will be reaching out shortly.
CFAR is not defunct. I am at a workshop right now with Jack and Vaniver (who also work with CFAR), and 7 other people, who are mostly adjunct CFAR instructors (aka, people who are skilled enough to run CFAR classes if they want, and who’ve trained with us some, but who usually do only very few hours of CFAR-esque work in a typical year), trying things out. Dan Keys is the fourth person who is also on CFAR’s “core staff” (though we are all part-time hourly); there’s also a number of other adjunct instructors.
Like some at MIRI, I’ve been taking something of a sabbatical year, loosely speaking. That is, I’ve been looking at the word trying to understand its joints. For me this sometimes involves running small experimental workshops, e.g. to try to see a thing with a group of people helping and geeking out about it together. It doesn’t so far involve trying to do anything at scale.
There are no super-secret projects at CFAR. I suppose I might not say if there were, but I at least wouldn’t say this.
We haven’t run mainlines in awhile. Irena (who is an adjunct CFAR instructor, and also upstairs in the venue asleep right now) keeps saying she may run one in Prague; if so, I and some others may fly in to help. Davis keeps saying he may co-organize one in Berkeley, in which case I’ll probably help also, but it’s not quite clear. If someone wants one and wants to co-organize, I may be down in general, but I don’t quite have the fire to generate those on my own right now—there may be people who would like to attend a CFAR workshop (okay, I know there are at least some), but running one isn’t quite the thing that feels like it’ll help me unravel the things I’m trying to understand, and also I don’t quite have the stomach for it in some ways, although I’m glad that the people who attended got to attend so this is a bit of a muddy thing to express well. It’s possible the workshop we’re currently experimenting in upstairs may lead to a revised mainline at some point, and one my heart could be more solidly in, but that “scale this up to a mainline” outcome is not a thing we’re driving at especially hard.
CFAR’s internal structure lately involves a “telos committee” who authorizes the allocation of funds internally by checking that the individual (from within CFAR’s “core team” or CFAR’s adjunct instructors / outside collaborators) has “telos” for the thing they want to do (and tries to get out of the way and let people do things they have “telos” for, without them needing to persuade others much). I like how this has been going. It is pretty low-key, though. It is plausible to me that we had to wind down before we can build freshly. We wound things down by ceasing to do anything that nobody had “telos” for (even things that were traditional, such as mainlines). Sort of a theory that things would be easier to see, or at minimum we’d have more slack with which to see, if there wasn’t any of that sort of clutter around.
I would not advise anyone wishing to solve human rationality, or to do anything else awesome, to refrain from attempting said awesome thing on the theory that we or anyone else has that covered. Such thinking always seemed insane to me; if it is more transparently insane now, that seems good. In hindsight, I wish we had chosen a more local name than the “Center for Applied Rationality” (such as “A Center for Applied Rationality” or “some random group in Berkeley who are taking a go at some applied rationality stuff while also having some more local goals about supporting MIRI’s staffing needs, and should totally not be occupying the entire namespace here”). We do not have a super secret rationality sauce such that people attempting such a thing from outside CFAR are at a bad disadvantage, or anything like that. If you want to try and want to make sure we don’t know something you’re missing first, I’m probably happy to talk. Others might be too but I can’t speak for them.
In terms of whether there is some interesting thing we discovered that caused us to abandon e.g. the mainline: I can’t speak for more than myself here either. But for my own take, I think we ran to some extent into the same problem that something-like-every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60′s or so has run into, which e.g. the documentary (read: 4-hour somewhat intense propaganda film) Century of the Self is a pretty good introduction to. I separately or also think the old mainline workshops provided a pretty good amount of real value to a lot of people, both directly (via the way folks encountered the workshop) and via networks (by introducing a bunch of people to each other who then hit it off and had a good time and good collaborations later). But there’s a thing near “self-help” that I’ll be trying to dodge in later iterations of mainline-esque workshops, if there are later iterations. I think. If you like, you can think with some accuracy of the small workshop we’re running this week, and its predecessor workshop a couple months ago, as experiments toward having a workshop where people stay outward-directed (stay focused on inquiring into outside things, or building stuff, or otherwise staring at the world outside their own heads) rather than focusing on e.g. acquiring “rationality habits” that involve a conforming of one’s own habits/internal mental states with some premade plan.
The above is somewhat scattered; feel free to ask more questions.
You refer to “the same problem that something like every self-help / hippy / human potential movement since the 60s has run into”, but then don’t say what that problem is (beyond gesturing to a “4-hour-long propaganda film”).
I can think of a number of possible problems that all such movements might have run into (or might credibly be thought to have run into) but it’s not obvious to me which of them, if any, you’re referring to.
Could you either clarify or be explicit that you intended not to say explicitly what you meant? Thanks!
[EDITED to fix a misquotation that made it look like Anna wrote something ungrammatical; sorry]
Sorry. I don’t have a good short description of the problem, and so did not try to say explicitly what I meant. Instead I tried to refer to a 4-hour film, “Century of the self,” as trying to describe the same problem.
I may come back later with an attempted description, probably not a good one.
Thanks. I am, realistically, not going to watch four hours of propaganda (assuming your description of it is accurate!) in the hope of figuring out what you meant, so in the hope that you will come back and have at least a sketchy try at it I’ll list my leading hypotheses so you have something concrete to point at and say “no, not that” about.
It turns out that actually it’s incredibly difficult to improve any of the things that actually stop people fulfilling what it seems should be their potential; whatever is getting in the way isn’t very fixable by training.
“Every cause wants to be a cult”, and self-help-y causes are particularly vulnerable to this and tend to get dangerously culty dangerously quickly.
Regardless of what’s happening to the cause as a whole, there are dangerously many opportunities for individuals to behave badly and ruin things for everyone.
In this space it is difficult to distinguish effective organizations from ineffective ones, and/or responsible ones from cultish/abusive ones, which means that if you’re trying to run an effective, responsible one you’re liable to find that your potential clients get seduced by the ineffective irresponsible ones that put more of their efforts into marketing.
In this space it is difficult to distinguish effective from ineffective interventions, which means that individuals and organizations are at risk of drifting into unfalsifiable woo.
As someone who has watched “Century of the Self” I’d guess it’s more along the lines of
What people want is not what they need. People don’t need much help to self-improve in ways which are already consonant with their natural desires and self-image. So any safe and effective self-improvement program would be a nonstarter in the free market because it would immediately repel the very people who could benefit from it.
Fair enough. FWIW, I found the movie good / full of useful anecdata for piecing together a puzzle that I personally care a lot about, and so found it rewarded my four hours, but our interests are probably pretty different and I know plenty who would find it empty and annoying.
On reflection, I shouldn’t have written my paragraph the way I did in my parent comment; I am not sure what trouble something-like-every self-help thingy has run into, I just suspect there’re threads in common based on how things look. I might be wrong about it.
Still, I wrote up my take on some of the hypotheses you listed (I appreciate that you took the trouble to list them; thanks!), and my take in general as to why we didn’t get a more formidable art of rationality. Many of the factors I list remind me of my guesses at a bunch of stuff that also happened to other self-help groups and the “human potential movement” and so on, but I haven’t researched those well and might be wrong. My take is long-winded, so I posted it blog-post style. I’d love your/others thoughts if you have them.
My take / my reply to your comment.
Seconding gjm’s reply, and wondering what can possibly be so difficult to talk about that even a 4-hour film can only be an introduction? I watched a few 20-second snippets scattered over its whole length (since this is an Adam Curtis film, that is all that is needed), and I am sceptical that the line that he draws through a century of history corresponds to a load-bearing rope in reality.
I suspect you should update the website with some of this? At the very least copying the above comment into a 2022 updates blog post.
The message ‘CFAR did some awesome things that we’re really proud of, now we’re considering pivoting to something else, more details to follow’ would be a lot better than the implicit message you may be sending currently ‘nobody is updating this website, the CFAR team lost interest and it’s not clear what the plan is or who’s in charge anymore’
Afterthoughts / later additions:
I used to be in-practice orienting to trying to help MIRI with recruiting. (Not, mostly, to trying to develop an art of human rationality, though there was some of that.)
MIRI is mostly not recruiting, or at least not in the way it used to be for the research programs it discontinued, so that is no longer a viable model for impact, which if you like you could reasonably accurately see as a cause of why I personally have been primarily trying to understand the world and to look for joints, rather than primarily trying to run mainlines at scale.
I do not think I’ve given up in any important sense, and I do not personally think CFAR has given up in any important sense either, although one of the strengths of our community has always been its disagreeableness, and the amount of scaling down and changing activities and such is enough that I will not think someone necessarily uninformed if they say the opposite.
My guess is actually that we’ll be less focused on AI or other narrow interventions, and more focused on something sort of like “human rationality broadly” (without “rationality” necessarily being quite the central thing—maybe more like: “sanity” or “ability to build and inquire and be sane and conscious and to stay able to care”). (“Rationality” in the sense of the “lens that sees its own flaws” is an amazing goal, but may have some more basic things as prereqs / necessary context, so may need to have a home as part of a larger goal.) But it’s hard to say.
We are open to hiring new people. Message me if you’re interested. If you come to CFAR, you’ll have a lot of freedom to do things you personally have telos to do, whether or not the rest of us fully see it; and you may be able to get some cool collaborations with us or others in our orbit, although we are few at the moment and also that part depends on whether whoever else sees sense in your project. Also, we have a great venue.
And a second afterthought:
I think for a long time CFAR was trying, though maybe not in a very smart/calibrated/wise/accurate way, to have public relationship with “the rationality community” along the lines of “we will attempt this project that you guys care about; and you guys may want to collaborate with us on that.” (Details varied by year; I think at the beginning something like this was more intended, accurate, and sincere, but after awhile it was more like accumulated branding we didn’t mean but didn’t update.)
I think at the moment we are not trying to take on any public mantles, including not that one.
This is probably also part of what’s up with us not prioritizing more public communication about CFAR, though I and I think others are happy to discuss what’s going on, but it’s not “here is a thing we’re doing, please believe in it’s potential.”
I honestly don’t really get why the “telos committee” is an overall good idea (though there may be some value in experimenting with that sort of thing)—intuitively, a large portion of extremely valuable projects are going to be boring, and the sort of thing that people are going to feel “burnt out” on a large portion of the time. Shutting down projects that don’t feel like saving the world probably doesn’t select well for projects that are maximilly effective. Might just be misunderstanding what you mean here, of course.
I really like this part:
As someone who worked for CFAR for a couple years and then quit at the beginning of 2021: In addition to this advice, I would also advise that anyone wishing to gain basic skill in rationality, teaching, and workshop running, because they do not yet feel ready to solve human rationality or do anything else awesome, should pursue some strategy other than “I will work for CFAR while I level up and maybe eventually become a real cool instructory person capable of Impact”. I think that CFAR is unusually likely to be bad for you. I hope you will learn to be awesome somewhere else instead.
This is great to hear.
The Guild of the ROSE is striving to teach rationality to the layperson, and are excited to carry on the torch you folks lit.
We will be reaching out shortly.