(April 2013 Workshop Attendee)
(The argument is that) A lot of the CFAR workshop material is very context dependent, and would lose significant value if distilled into text or video. Personally speaking, a lot of what I got out of the workshop was only achievable in the intensive environment - the casual discussion about the material, the reasons behind why you might want to do something, etc - a lot of it can't be conveyed in a one hour video. Now, maybe CFAR could go ahead and try to get at least some of the content value into videos, etc, but that has two concerns. One is the reputational problem with 'publishing' lesser-quality material, and the other is sorta-almost akin to the 'valley of bad rationality'. If you teach someone, say, the mechanics of aversion therapy, but not when to use it, or they learn a superficial version of the principle, that can be worse than never having learned it at all, and it seems plausible that this is true of some of the CFAR material also.
I agree that there are concerns, and you would lose a lot of the depth, but my real concern is with how this makes me perceive CFAR. When I am told that there are things I can't see/hear until I pay money, it makes me feel like it's all some sort of money making scheme, and question whether the goal is actually just to teach as many people as much as possible, or just to maximize revenue. Again, let me clarify that I'm not trying to attack CFAR, I believe that they probably are an honest and good thing, but I'm trying to convey how I initially feel when ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.