FYI, I think this is a lot harder than it sounds. A lot of people take a look at CFAR and think “hmm, they don’t seem to be doing the obvious things, what up?”… but actually they’re either...
already doing the obvious things
...or, the obvious things turned out to be wrong, or a lot harder than you think, or trade off against other things that are more important.
I have come to believe there should be multiple rationality research orgs running in parallel, trying things differently, but the things I’m most excited to see tried differently aren’t the usual things people bring up (such as long boot camps, online materials, measurement and RCTs. I think CFAR mostly doesn’t do those for good reasons).
Instead, I’m interested more in people pursuing subtly different agendas, following different intuitions and hard-to-convey-models, oriented around somewhat different goals.
My impression is that CFAR ended up orienting a lot around what I’d call “the internal alignment paradigm” (including but not limited to the stuff Kaj Sotala is writing up these days, although Kaj himself is not from CFAR). I think this is a good paradigm, but I’d like to see more diversity of paradigms trying to solve different problems.
I don’t think this results in 10x CFAR, just different research paths.
As for CFAR itself and what would 10x it, the answers I think are mostly of the form “have clearer vision and better internal management structures” (which are pretty hard for outsiders to have useful opinions about)
I also think it’d be better if CFAR wrote up more of it’s stuff, not from an “online training materials” standpoint, but from a “allowing others to build off their research” standpoint (which isn’t precisely a way to 10x CFAR itself, but to maybe improve the overall output of people-who-are-developing-rationality-training)
FYI, I think this is a lot harder than it sounds. A lot of people take a look at CFAR and think “hmm, they don’t seem to be doing the obvious things, what up?”… but actually they’re either...
already doing the obvious things
...or, the obvious things turned out to be wrong, or a lot harder than you think, or trade off against other things that are more important.
I have come to believe there should be multiple rationality research orgs running in parallel, trying things differently, but the things I’m most excited to see tried differently aren’t the usual things people bring up (such as long boot camps, online materials, measurement and RCTs. I think CFAR mostly doesn’t do those for good reasons).
Instead, I’m interested more in people pursuing subtly different agendas, following different intuitions and hard-to-convey-models, oriented around somewhat different goals.
My impression is that CFAR ended up orienting a lot around what I’d call “the internal alignment paradigm” (including but not limited to the stuff Kaj Sotala is writing up these days, although Kaj himself is not from CFAR). I think this is a good paradigm, but I’d like to see more diversity of paradigms trying to solve different problems.
I don’t think this results in 10x CFAR, just different research paths.
As for CFAR itself and what would 10x it, the answers I think are mostly of the form “have clearer vision and better internal management structures” (which are pretty hard for outsiders to have useful opinions about)
I also think it’d be better if CFAR wrote up more of it’s stuff, not from an “online training materials” standpoint, but from a “allowing others to build off their research” standpoint (which isn’t precisely a way to 10x CFAR itself, but to maybe improve the overall output of people-who-are-developing-rationality-training)