This would imply that CFAR should be pitching its workshops to academics and government policymakers.

My understanding is that CFAR is attended by both present and likely future academics; I don't know about government policymakers. (I've met people on national advisory boards from at least two countries at CFAR workshops, but I don't pretend to know how much influence they have on those boards, or how much influence those boards have on actual policy.)

Not to be a dick, but the latest local-mobile-social app-kerjigger is not intensive cognitive labor with a high impact on the world.

At time of writing this comment, there are 14 startups listed in the post. What number of them would you consider local-mobile-social apps? (This seems to be an example of "not to be X" signifying "I am aware this is being an X but would like to avoid paying the relevant penalty.")

I would hope so! But what information indicates CFAR does this?

I have always gotten the impression from them that they want to be as cause agnostic as is reasonable, but I can't speak to their probability estimates over time and thus how they've updated.

The biggest impact we can have on "raising the sanity waterline" is to move people from the group who believe in a Fideist Theory of Truth ("Things are true by virtue of how I feel about them") to people who believe in the Correspondence Theory of Truth ("Things are true when they match the world outside my head!"), which also thus inspires people to listen to educated domain experts at all.

Are there people working on a reproducible system to help people make this move? It's not at all obvious to me that this would be the comparative advantage of the people at CFAR. (Though it seems to me that much of the CFAR material is helping people finish making that transition, or, at least, get further along it.)