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maia comments on Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Question about EA and CFAR. I think I've heard some people express sentiments that CFAR might be a good place for EAs to donate, due to the whole "raising the sanity waterline" thing.
On its face, this seems silly to me. From the outside view, CFAR just looks like a small self-help organization, though probably better than most such organizations, and it seems unlikely that it'll affect any significant portion of the population.
I think CFAR is great; I went to minicamp, and I think it probably improved my life, although I suspect I'm not as enthusiastic about it as most people who went. But if I were to give CFAR any money, it would be because it helps me and people I know, not because I think it's actually likely to have a large impact on the world.
Are there people around here who believe CFAR is actually likely to have a large impact on the world? Could you explain your reasoning why?
CFAR is working to discover systematic training methods for increasing rationality in humans.
If they discover said methods, and make them publicly available, that could massively increase the sanity waterline on a global scale.
This will require much work, but I think that it's really important work.
The difference between CFAR and most self-help organisation is that CFAR is committed to publishing research about it's interventions.
Published research into effective change work is important.
Source?
Also this: http://rationality.org/2013/09/27/surprise-as-a-cue-to-probability-experiment-1/
Eliezer said so on facebook.
I think the self-help aspects are intended to be a first step preliminary to ideally getting CFAR concepts into schools and colleges. CFAR is still very new and small, and haven't done a lot apart from reaching out to a few smart kids in that direction but I believe that is the goal.
What does the size of the organization matter?
Roughly speaking, if the value of sending a person to CFAR is the same, regardless of whether a hundred people go or a million go. If you are paying for a scholarship today, the benefit is largely about the effect on that person, regardless of future students. What is the alternative charity? If you spend to save a life, that's just one person, too.
Here are two reasons why scale could matter. One is room for funding. If you think CFAR will never get big, then it will never consume that much money. So it wouldn't have room for a lot of funding. But the important question is whether it has room for your funding. Eventual size doesn't tell us much about that.
Another reason is gains from scale. The value of sending the millionth person may be the same as the value of the hundredth, but the cost may be much smaller. Curriculum development is amortized across students. If the next bit of funding is going to pay for curriculum development and two people agree about the value of the curriculum for the average student, but may disagree about the total value because they disagree about how many students it will reach.
Luke has suggested that part of what CFAR does is the movement-building work that MIRI used to do. I'm not quite sure how to interpret this suggestion, but maybe idea is that CFAR is set up in such a way that spread "worrying about x-risk" memes ends up being an important side-effect of what they do. This is something I will probably start a thread on next time I have $ I want to donate to charity.