= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@<p>This stress and clutter was part of what was preventing us from seeing what we were doing, and figuring out how to actually contribute to the world; smoothing out the wrinkles in our day-to-day workflow was (we think) a major stepping stone toward discovering our minimum strategic product.</p><p>That’s why we spent a lot of time and effort this year on streamlining operations and increasing specialization so that we could both free the capacity to focus on developing the art and create the capacity to scale our workshops. We systematized tasks like accounting and venue searches, and began using alumni volunteers as follow up mentors to supplement our newly-created post-workshop email exercises and online hangouts. These efforts culminated in two new hires—Pete Michaud and Duncan Sabien—and a reorganization of CFAR into two subteams, Core (focused on operations) and Labs (focused on research).</p><p>For a complete overview of what we intend to accomplish in 2016, see Ambitions for 2016 below.</p>-<h2><a id="Art_Creation_66"></a>Some snapshots from our rationality development</h2>+<h2><a id="Art_Creation_66"></a><a name="snapshots"></a>Some snapshots from our rationality development</h2><p>There is the process by which we improve a workshop, and there is the process by which we improve our understanding of how rationality works at its core. The two processes don’t always help one another, but this year they did.</p><p>How we got there:</p><ul>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -10,7 +10,6 @@<div><p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a></p><h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="mission"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</span></h2>-<p> </p></div><p>CFAR’s mission is to help people develop the abilities that let them meaningfully assist with the world’s most important problems, by improving their ability to arrive at accurate beliefs, act effectively in the real world, and sustainably care about that world.</p><p>We know this is an audacious thing to try—especially the “ability to form accurate beliefs” part—but it seems to us that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Feynman!">such</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws">attempts</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting">work</a> sometimes anyhow. Eliezer’s <a href="/lw/lvb/rationality_from_ai_to_zombies/">Sequences</a> seem to offer principled improvements to some aspects of some peoples' world-modeling skill (via synthesizing much recent cognitive science, probability theory, etc.); this seems to us to be a useful point from which to build.</p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -8,9 +8,9 @@<li><a href="#howhelp">Ask your help, via donations and other means.</a></li></ul><div>-<p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a>+<p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a></p><h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="mission"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</span></h2>-</p>+<p> </p></div><p>CFAR’s mission is to help people develop the abilities that let them meaningfully assist with the world’s most important problems, by improving their ability to arrive at accurate beliefs, act effectively in the real world, and sustainably care about that world.</p><p>We know this is an audacious thing to try—especially the “ability to form accurate beliefs” part—but it seems to us that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Feynman!">such</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws">attempts</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting">work</a> sometimes anyhow. Eliezer’s <a href="/lw/lvb/rationality_from_ai_to_zombies/">Sequences</a> seem to offer principled improvements to some aspects of some peoples' world-modeling skill (via synthesizing much recent cognitive science, probability theory, etc.); this seems to us to be a useful point from which to build.</p>@@ -91,7 +91,7 @@<p>We’re now in an excellent position to make CFAR much less dependent on donations going forward while simultaneously putting more focused effort on development, testing, and sharing of rationality tools than we’ve been able to do in the past.</p><p>This has made 2016 look very promising — but it has also put us in a difficult position right now.</p><p>We’re farther behind right now than we were this time last year, and we need some capital to implement the plans we have in mind. Predicting markets is always hard, but we think that with one more financial push this winter, we can both improve our contribution to the development of rationality and also make CFAR largely or maybe even entirely financially self-sustaining in 2016.</p>-<h2><a name="#ambitions"></a>Ambitions for 2016</h2>+<h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="ambitions"></a>Ambitions for 2016</span></h2><h3><a id="Hitting_Scale_144"></a>Hitting Scale</h3><p>CFAR’s mission cashes out when people we equipped to think better and do more are actually in positions where they are changing the future of our world for the better.</p><p>With our external brand and our positioning within the community, we are perhaps uniquely well positioned to attract bright people, orient them to the values of systematically truer beliefs and world scale impact, and then make sure they get into the highest leverage positions they can fill.</p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -8,15 +8,16 @@<li><a href="#howhelp">Ask your help, via donations and other means.</a></li></ul><div>-<p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a></p>+<p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a>+<h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="mission"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</span></h2>+</p></div>-<h2><a id="CFARs_mission_and_why_that_mission_matters_today_18"></a><a name="#mission"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</h2><p>CFAR’s mission is to help people develop the abilities that let them meaningfully assist with the world’s most important problems, by improving their ability to arrive at accurate beliefs, act effectively in the real world, and sustainably care about that world.</p><p>We know this is an audacious thing to try—especially the “ability to form accurate beliefs” part—but it seems to us that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Feynman!">such</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws">attempts</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting">work</a> sometimes anyhow. Eliezer’s <a href="/lw/lvb/rationality_from_ai_to_zombies/">Sequences</a> seem to offer principled improvements to some aspects of some peoples' world-modeling skill (via synthesizing much recent cognitive science, probability theory, etc.); this seems to us to be a useful point from which to build.</p><p>The fact remains that we do not yet have the talent necessary to win—to see the world’s problems clearly, plot strategies that have a shot at working, update when those strategies don’t work, and plan effectively around unknowns. To avoid any great filters that may be lurking, solve global and even astronomical challenges, and create a flourishing world for all.</p><p>Arguably, people of the caliber we’re shooting for don’t exist yet, but even if they do, it seems clear that we don’t have enough of them to have enough of a guarantee of <em>actually succeeding</em>.</p><p>So, audacious or not, this is a task that needs to be done, and CFAR is our attempt to do it. If we can widen the bottleneck on thinking better and doing more, we’re increasing the odds of a better future regardless of what the important problems turn out to be.</p>-<h2><a id="Our_progress_to_date_30"></a><a name="#progress"></a>Our progress to date</h2>+<h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="progress"></a>Our progress to date</span></h2><p>By the end of 2014, CFAR had created workshops that participants liked a lot and which <a href="/lw/n2g/results_of_a_oneyear_longitudinal_study_of_cfar/">evidence suggests</a> had concrete benefits for them. However, our mission remains to impact the world. The question became whether we could adapt our workshops into something that had the potential for large impact. </p><p>Our central goal for 2015 was therefore to create what we called a "minimum <em>strategic</em> product" -- a product that, as we put it <a href="/lw/lfg/cfar_in_2014_continuing_to_climb_out_of_the/#attempts">last year</a>, would "more directly justify CFAR's claim to be an effective altruist project" by demonstrating that we could sometimes improve peoples' thinking skill, competence, and/or do-gooding to the point where they were able to engage in direct work on a key talent-limited task.</p><p>Running the MIRI Summer Fellows program gave the opportunity we'd sought to try our hand at creating such direct impact. Our plan was to test and develop our curriculum and training methods through running a training program that would not only improve people’s ability to think about some of the big questions, but also do so in a fashion that could lead to immediate progress.</p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@<p>The primary limiting factor in these plans is our ability to attract a truly excellent sales person or team. With a sufficient workshop participation, cashflow bottlenecks are broken and we‘ll achieve economies of scale that will fundamentally transform our operations.</p><p>Failing that recruitment, the next best alternative is to grow organically through the MTP and other community programs. That is a much slower process, but pushes us in the same fundamental direction.</p><p>And as always, our plans coming into contact with the reality of 2016 will correctly cause us to update, iterate, and potentially pivot given new evidence and insight.</p>-<h2><a id="The_path_forward_and_how_you_can_help_226"></a><a name="#howhelp"></a>The path forward, and how you can help</h2>+<h2><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a name="howhelp"></a>The path forward, and how you can help</span></h2><p>CFAR’s mission is to gather together people with the potential for real and meaningful impact, and to cause them to come closer to meeting that potential. It doesn’t much matter whether you think we’re under a ticking clock of existential risk, or you’re concerned about a million humans dying every week, or you’re simply grumpy that we haven’t gotten a human past low earth orbit since 1972—our individual and collective thinking skill is a key bottleneck on our future.</p><p>Applied rationality, more than almost anything else, has a shot at being a <em>truly</em> all-purpose tool in humanity’s toolkit, and the bigger the problems on the horizon, the more vital that tool becomes.</p><p>2016 will be a particularly critical year in CFAR’s history. We’re restructuring our team in pretty major ways, and finding the right team members (or not) will determine our ability to get the right character and culture from this new beginning; and we've had at least three good people in the last eight months who we wanted to hire, and who wanted to work for us, but who required salaries we couldn't afford. Beginnings are far easier times in which to make change, and this is the closest we've come to a fresh beginning -- and the time we've most expected differential impact from marginal donation -- since our inaugural fundraiser of late 2012. </p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@<li><strong>Do-gooding and epistemic rationality.</strong> “Do-gooding” would seem to be a goal that some have and others don’t, and it would seem odd to try to shift <em>goals</em> by learning epistemic rationality. But it seems to many of us (informally, anecdotally) that there is a kind of “deep epistemic rationality” that doesn’t <em>change</em> one’s goals, but <em>does</em> help one make actual contact with what is at stake in the world, and with the parts of one's psyche that <em>already</em> care about those stakes... and this can sometimes help in practice to build deep, sustainable caring. The idea is again to e.g. notice a part of you that thinks the world matters, and a part of you that is afraid to look in that direction, and help these parts trade model-pieces and update back and forth (double crux, again). For an early attempt to articulate pieces of this "art of connecting to deep caring", see Val’s <a href="/lw/n2x/the_art_of_grieving_well/">recent post on grieving</a>.</li><li><strong>Teaching the synthesis.</strong> Our pre-2015 workshops were made of techniques, which was like sounding out words a letter at a time (C-A-T…C…Ca…Cat!). After years of trying to use these techniques to point at the deeper skill (Cat! Hat! Antidisestablishmentarianism!), we’ve finally found framings and explanations (like this one) that actually bridge the gap. Those framings, plus an explicit emphasis on synthesis and the addition of peer-to-peer tutoring, have successfully transformed the techniques into stepping stones toward the actual art. (The techniques are now stuffed into the first two days; the synthesis, and the rhythms of using applied rationality in practice, now occupy the second half of the workshop and give people a better sense of the lived feeling of the art. We think.)</li></ul>-<p>This is the beginning of work that we’re poised to expand and improve in the coming year via our new Labs group.</p>+<p>This is the beginning of work that we’re poised to expand and improve in the coming year via our new Labs group.<a name="finances"></a></p><h2><a id="Financial_Retrospective_for_2015_86"></a><a name="#finances"></a>Financial Retrospective for 2015</h2><h3><a id="General_overview_88"></a>General overview</h3><p>Our net cashflow for the year is about $14k positive so far, though without any further revenue we expect to be around $30k negative by the end of December 2015, as most of our large expenses (rent, payroll, etc.) occur at the end of the month. Note that this includes donation revenue from last year’s winter fundraiser.</p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -90,7 +90,7 @@<p>We’re now in an excellent position to make CFAR much less dependent on donations going forward while simultaneously putting more focused effort on development, testing, and sharing of rationality tools than we’ve been able to do in the past.</p><p>This has made 2016 look very promising — but it has also put us in a difficult position right now.</p><p>We’re farther behind right now than we were this time last year, and we need some capital to implement the plans we have in mind. Predicting markets is always hard, but we think that with one more financial push this winter, we can both improve our contribution to the development of rationality and also make CFAR largely or maybe even entirely financially self-sustaining in 2016.</p>-<h2><a id="Ambitions_for_2016_142"></a><a name="#ambitions"></a>Ambitions for 2016</h2>+<h2><a name="#ambitions"></a>Ambitions for 2016</h2><h3><a id="Hitting_Scale_144"></a>Hitting Scale</h3><p>CFAR’s mission cashes out when people we equipped to think better and do more are actually in positions where they are changing the future of our world for the better.</p><p>With our external brand and our positioning within the community, we are perhaps uniquely well positioned to attract bright people, orient them to the values of systematically truer beliefs and world scale impact, and then make sure they get into the highest leverage positions they can fill.</p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -2,10 +2,10 @@<p>In this post, we:</p><ul><li><a href="#mission">Revisit CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today;</a></li>-<li>Review our progress to date;</li>-<li>Offer a look at our financial overview;</li>-<li>Share our ambitions for 2016; and</li>-<li>Ask your help, via donations and other means.</li>+<li><a href="#progress">Review our progress to date;</a></li>+<li><a href="#finances">Offer a look at our financial overview;</a></li>+<li><a href="#ambitions">Share our ambitions for 2016</a>; and</li>+<li><a href="#howhelp">Ask your help, via donations and other means.</a></li></ul><div><p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a></p>@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@<p>The fact remains that we do not yet have the talent necessary to win—to see the world’s problems clearly, plot strategies that have a shot at working, update when those strategies don’t work, and plan effectively around unknowns. To avoid any great filters that may be lurking, solve global and even astronomical challenges, and create a flourishing world for all.</p><p>Arguably, people of the caliber we’re shooting for don’t exist yet, but even if they do, it seems clear that we don’t have enough of them to have enough of a guarantee of <em>actually succeeding</em>.</p><p>So, audacious or not, this is a task that needs to be done, and CFAR is our attempt to do it. If we can widen the bottleneck on thinking better and doing more, we’re increasing the odds of a better future regardless of what the important problems turn out to be.</p>-<h2><a id="Our_progress_to_date_30"></a>Our progress to date</h2>+<h2><a id="Our_progress_to_date_30"></a><a name="#progress"></a>Our progress to date</h2><p>By the end of 2014, CFAR had created workshops that participants liked a lot and which <a href="/lw/n2g/results_of_a_oneyear_longitudinal_study_of_cfar/">evidence suggests</a> had concrete benefits for them. However, our mission remains to impact the world. The question became whether we could adapt our workshops into something that had the potential for large impact. </p><p>Our central goal for 2015 was therefore to create what we called a "minimum <em>strategic</em> product" -- a product that, as we put it <a href="/lw/lfg/cfar_in_2014_continuing_to_climb_out_of_the/#attempts">last year</a>, would "more directly justify CFAR's claim to be an effective altruist project" by demonstrating that we could sometimes improve peoples' thinking skill, competence, and/or do-gooding to the point where they were able to engage in direct work on a key talent-limited task.</p><p>Running the MIRI Summer Fellows program gave the opportunity we'd sought to try our hand at creating such direct impact. Our plan was to test and develop our curriculum and training methods through running a training program that would not only improve people’s ability to think about some of the big questions, but also do so in a fashion that could lead to immediate progress.</p>@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@<li><strong>Teaching the synthesis.</strong> Our pre-2015 workshops were made of techniques, which was like sounding out words a letter at a time (C-A-T…C…Ca…Cat!). After years of trying to use these techniques to point at the deeper skill (Cat! Hat! Antidisestablishmentarianism!), we’ve finally found framings and explanations (like this one) that actually bridge the gap. Those framings, plus an explicit emphasis on synthesis and the addition of peer-to-peer tutoring, have successfully transformed the techniques into stepping stones toward the actual art. (The techniques are now stuffed into the first two days; the synthesis, and the rhythms of using applied rationality in practice, now occupy the second half of the workshop and give people a better sense of the lived feeling of the art. We think.)</li></ul><p>This is the beginning of work that we’re poised to expand and improve in the coming year via our new Labs group.</p>-<h2><a id="Financial_Retrospective_for_2015_86"></a>Financial Retrospective for 2015</h2>+<h2><a id="Financial_Retrospective_for_2015_86"></a><a name="#finances"></a>Financial Retrospective for 2015</h2><h3><a id="General_overview_88"></a>General overview</h3><p>Our net cashflow for the year is about $14k positive so far, though without any further revenue we expect to be around $30k negative by the end of December 2015, as most of our large expenses (rent, payroll, etc.) occur at the end of the month. Note that this includes donation revenue from last year’s winter fundraiser.</p><p>Our basic monthly operating costs for 2015 have averaged $40k, although the average after September went up to $44k due to changing and slightly expanding our team. This is the number we use to determine burn rate.</p>@@ -90,7 +90,7 @@<p>We’re now in an excellent position to make CFAR much less dependent on donations going forward while simultaneously putting more focused effort on development, testing, and sharing of rationality tools than we’ve been able to do in the past.</p><p>This has made 2016 look very promising — but it has also put us in a difficult position right now.</p><p>We’re farther behind right now than we were this time last year, and we need some capital to implement the plans we have in mind. Predicting markets is always hard, but we think that with one more financial push this winter, we can both improve our contribution to the development of rationality and also make CFAR largely or maybe even entirely financially self-sustaining in 2016.</p>-<h2><a id="Ambitions_for_2016_142"></a>Ambitions for 2016</h2>+<h2><a id="Ambitions_for_2016_142"></a><a name="#ambitions"></a>Ambitions for 2016</h2><h3><a id="Hitting_Scale_144"></a>Hitting Scale</h3><p>CFAR’s mission cashes out when people we equipped to think better and do more are actually in positions where they are changing the future of our world for the better.</p><p>With our external brand and our positioning within the community, we are perhaps uniquely well positioned to attract bright people, orient them to the values of systematically truer beliefs and world scale impact, and then make sure they get into the highest leverage positions they can fill.</p>@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@<p>The primary limiting factor in these plans is our ability to attract a truly excellent sales person or team. With a sufficient workshop participation, cashflow bottlenecks are broken and we‘ll achieve economies of scale that will fundamentally transform our operations.</p><p>Failing that recruitment, the next best alternative is to grow organically through the MTP and other community programs. That is a much slower process, but pushes us in the same fundamental direction.</p><p>And as always, our plans coming into contact with the reality of 2016 will correctly cause us to update, iterate, and potentially pivot given new evidence and insight.</p>-<h2><a id="The_path_forward_and_how_you_can_help_226"></a>The path forward, and how you can help</h2>+<h2><a id="The_path_forward_and_how_you_can_help_226"></a><a name="#howhelp"></a>The path forward, and how you can help</h2><p>CFAR’s mission is to gather together people with the potential for real and meaningful impact, and to cause them to come closer to meeting that potential. It doesn’t much matter whether you think we’re under a ticking clock of existential risk, or you’re concerned about a million humans dying every week, or you’re simply grumpy that we haven’t gotten a human past low earth orbit since 1972—our individual and collective thinking skill is a key bottleneck on our future.</p><p>Applied rationality, more than almost anything else, has a shot at being a <em>truly</em> all-purpose tool in humanity’s toolkit, and the bigger the problems on the horizon, the more vital that tool becomes.</p><p>2016 will be a particularly critical year in CFAR’s history. We’re restructuring our team in pretty major ways, and finding the right team members (or not) will determine our ability to get the right character and culture from this new beginning; and we've had at least three good people in the last eight months who we wanted to hire, and who wanted to work for us, but who required salaries we couldn't afford. Beginnings are far easier times in which to make change, and this is the closest we've come to a fresh beginning -- and the time we've most expected differential impact from marginal donation -- since our inaugural fundraiser of late 2012. </p>
Why CFAR? The view from 2015
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@<p>Follow-up to: <a href="/lw/jej/why_cfar/">2013</a> and <a href="/lw/lfg/cfar_in_2014_continuing_to_climb_out_of_the/">2014</a>.</p><p>In this post, we:</p><ul>-<li>Revisit CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today;</li>+<li><a href="#mission">Revisit CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today;</a></li><li>Review our progress to date;</li><li>Offer a look at our financial overview;</li><li>Share our ambitions for 2016; and</li>@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@<div><p>We are in the middle of our <a href="http://rationality.org/fundraiser2015/">matching fundraiser</a>; so if you’ve been considering donating to CFAR this year, now is an unusually good time.<a id="more"></a></p></div>-<h2><a id="CFARs_mission_and_why_that_mission_matters_today_18"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</h2>+<h2><a id="CFARs_mission_and_why_that_mission_matters_today_18"></a><a name="#mission"></a>CFAR’s mission, and why that mission matters today</h2><p>CFAR’s mission is to help people develop the abilities that let them meaningfully assist with the world’s most important problems, by improving their ability to arrive at accurate beliefs, act effectively in the real world, and sustainably care about that world.</p><p>We know this is an audacious thing to try—especially the “ability to form accurate beliefs” part—but it seems to us that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Feynman!">such</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws">attempts</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting">work</a> sometimes anyhow. Eliezer’s <a href="/lw/lvb/rationality_from_ai_to_zombies/">Sequences</a> seem to offer principled improvements to some aspects of some peoples' world-modeling skill (via synthesizing much recent cognitive science, probability theory, etc.); this seems to us to be a useful point from which to build.</p><p>The fact remains that we do not yet have the talent necessary to win—to see the world’s problems clearly, plot strategies that have a shot at working, update when those strategies don’t work, and plan effectively around unknowns. To avoid any great filters that may be lurking, solve global and even astronomical challenges, and create a flourishing world for all.</p>
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