Summary: We outline the case for CFAR, including:
CFAR is in the middle of our annual matching fundraiser right now. If you've been thinking of donating to CFAR, now is the best time to decide for probably at least half a year. Donations up to $150,000 will be matched until January 31st; and Matt Wage, who is matching the last $50,000 of donations, has vowed not to donate unless matched.[1]
Our workshops are cash-flow positive, and subsidize our basic operations (you are not subsidizing workshop attendees). But we can't yet run workshops often enough to fully cover our core operations. We also need to do more formal experiments, and we want to create free and low-cost curriculum with far broader reach than the current workshops. Donations are needed to keep the lights on at CFAR, fund free programs like the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition, and let us do new and interesting things in 2014 (see below, at length).[2]
Our long-term goal
CFAR's long-term goal is to create people who can and will solve important problems -- whatever the important problems turn out to be.[3]
We therefore aim to create a community with three key properties:
- Competence -- The ability to get things done in the real world. For example, the ability to work hard, follow through on plans, push past your fears, navigate social situations, organize teams of people, start and run successful businesses, etc.
- Epistemic rationality -- The ability to form relatively accurate beliefs. Especially the ability to form such beliefs in cases where data is limited, motivated cognition is tempting, or the conventional wisdom is incorrect.
- Do-gooding -- A desire to make the world better for all its people; the tendency to jump in and start/assist projects that might help (whether by labor or by donation); and ambition in keeping an eye out for projects that might help a lot and not just a little.
Our plan, and our progress to date
How can we create a community with high levels of competence, epistemic rationality, and do-gooding? By creating curricula that teach (or enhance) these properties; by seeding the community with diverse competencies and diverse perspectives on how to do good; and by linking people together into the right kind of community.
Curriculum design
Progress to date
- Shorter workshops: We’re working on shorter versions of our workshops (including three-hour and one-day courses) that can be given to larger sets of people at lower cost.
- College courses: We helped develop a course on rational thinking -- for UC Berkeley undergraduates, in partnership with Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter. We also brought several high school and university instructors to our workshop, to help seed early experimentation into their curricula.
- Increasing visibility: We’ve been working on increasing our visibility among the general public, with alumni James Miller and Tim Czech both working on non-fiction books that feature CFAR, and several mainstream media articles about CFAR on their way, including one forthcoming shortly in the Wall Street Journal.
Next steps
Forging community
Progress to date
Next steps
- A two-day "Epistemic Rationality and EA" mini-workshop in January, targeted at alumni
- An alumni reunion this summer (which will be a multi-day event drawing folks our entire worldwide alumni community, unlike the alumni parties at each workshop);
- An alumni directory, as an attempt to increase business and philanthropic partnerships among alumni.
Financials
Expenses
- About $7k for our office space
- About $3k for miscellaneous expenses
- About $30k for salary & wages, going forward
- We have five full-time people on salary, each getting $3.5k per month gross. The employer portion of taxes adds roughly an additional $1k/month per employee.
- The remaining $7k or so goes to hourly employees and contractors. We have two roughly full-time hourly employees, and a few contractors who do website adjustment and maintenance, workbook compilation for a workshop, and similarly targeted tasks.
Revenue
Donations
Savings and debt
Summary
How you can help
Our main goals in 2014:
- Building a scalable revenue base, including via ramping up our workshop quality, workshop variety, and our marketing reach.
- Community-building, including an alumni reunion.
- Creating more connections with the effective altruism community, and other opportunities for our alumni to get involved in do-gooding.
- Research to feed back into our curriculum -- on the effectiveness of particular rationality techniques, as well as the long-term impact of rationality training on meaningful life outcomes.
- Developing more classes on epistemic rationality.
Some comments below.
And publishing detailed analysis and reasons that get it massive media attention and draw in and convince people who may have been persuadable but had not in fact been persuaded. Also in sharing a lot of epistemic and methodological points on their blogs and site. Many GIveWell readers and users are in touch with each other and with GiveWell, and GiveWell has played an important role in the growth of EA as a whole, including people making other decisions (such as founding organizations and changing their career or research plans, in addition to their donations).
I would add that counseled folk and extensive web traffic also get exposed to ideas like prioritzation, cause-neutrality, wide variation in effectiveness, etc, and ways to follow up. They built a membership/social networking functionality, but I think they are making it less prominent on the website to focus on the research and counseling, in response to their experience so far.
Separately, how much of a difference is there between a three-day CFAR workshop and a temporary "rationality infusion"?
The post describes a combination of selection for existing capacities, connection, and training, not creation (which would be harder).
As the post mentions, there isn't clear evidence that this happened, and there is room for negative effects. But I do see a lot of value in developing rationality training that works, as measured in randomized trials using life outcomes, Tetlock-type predictive accuracy, or similar endpoints. I would say that the value of CFAR training today is more about testing/R&D and creating a commercial platform that can enable further R&D than any educational value of their current offerings.
I don't know much about what they have been doing lately, but they have had at least a couple of specific achievements. They held an effective altruist conference that was well-received by several people I spoke with, and a small percentage of people donating or joining other EA organizations report that they found out about effective altruism ideas through Leverage's THINK.
They may have had other more substantial achievements, but they are not easily discernible from the Leverage website. Their team seems very energetic, but much of it is focused on developing and applying a homegrown amateur psychological theory that contradicts established physics, biology, and psychology (previous LW discussion here and here ). That remains a significant worry for me about Leverage.
Thank you, that's helpful.