Benito comments on Unofficial Canon on Applied Rationality - LessWrong

28 Post author: ScottL 15 February 2016 01:03PM

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Comment author: Crux 15 February 2016 10:45:23PM *  6 points [-]

CFAR has all of this material readily available likely in a much more comprehensive and accurate format. CFAR are altruists. Smart altruists. The lack of anything like this canon suggests that they don't think having this publicly available is a good idea. Not yet anyway. Even the workbook handed out at the workshops isn't available.

Rather than deferring to the judgment of the Smart Altruists and assuming that within their secret backroom discussions they've determined with logic, rigor, and a plethora of academic citations that it's crucial to the mission of raising the sanity waterline to not release a comprehensive exposition of their body of rationality techniques, perhaps we need only consider your second point except in less reverential light:

I highly value CFAR as an organisation. I want them to be highly funded and want as many people to attend their workshops as possible. It would upset me to learn that someone had read my compilation and not attended a workshop thinking they had gotten most of the value they could.

So much for the Internet-era model of "free information to be disseminated to all".

Without a deferential attitude toward the Great Rationalists of CFAR, Occam's Razor suggests that perhaps they're simply trying to keep the money flowing. Would it upset you if thousands of people without the resources or time to make it to a CFAR workshop had access to a self-study version of the CFAR curriculum?

Comment author: Benito 15 February 2016 11:19:35PM 4 points [-]

Pretty sure the main reason for not publicising their ideas so far has been their wanting to get lots of good feedback loops around learning whether it works or not. This year they're planning to scale up a lot how many courses they run, to work with a lot more people, and I think Anna has mentioned somewhere that she wants to write a lot of her main insights up somewhere public. I think they just wanted to take the time to be confident they had good stuff.