[CFAR's newest instructor, here; longtime educator and transhumanist-in-theory with practical confusions]

ScottL—I'm just coming out of the third workshop in six weeks, and flying to Boston to give some talks, so I'm exhausted and haven't had a chance to read through your compilation yet. I will, soon (+1 for the effort you've put forth), but in the meantime I wanted to pop in and give some thoughts on the comments thus far.

Benito, Rainbow, and Crux—+1 for all three perspectives.

Can CFAR content be learned from a compilation or writeup? Yes. After all, it's not magic—it was developed by careful thinkers looking at research and at their own cognition, iterated over 20+ formal attempts (and literally hundreds of informal ones) to share those same insights with others. It's complex, but it's also fundamentally discoverable.

However, there are three large problems (as I see it, speaking as the least experienced staff member). The first is the most obvious—it's hard. It's hard like learning karate from text descriptions is hard. If you go about this properly, without being sloppy or taking shortcuts or making dangerous assumptions, then you're in for a LONG, difficult haul. Speaking as someone who pieced together the discipline of parkour back in 2003, from scattered terrible videos (pre Youtube) and a few internet comment boards—pulling together a cohesive and working practice from even the best writeups is a tremendously difficult task. It's better on almost every axis with instructors, mentors, friends, companions—people to help you avoid the biggest pitfalls, help you understand the subtle points, tease apart the interesting implications, shore up your motivation, assist you in seeing your own mistakes and weaknesses. None of that is impossible on your own, but it's somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude more efficient and more efficacious with guidance.

The second is corruption. As Benito points out, a large part of the problem of rationality instruction is finding things that actually work—if mere knowledge of the flaws were sufficient to protect us from the flaws, then everybody who cared enough could just slog through Heuristics and Biases and be something like 70% of the way there. We've already put several thousand thought-hours and 20+ iterations into tinkering with content, scaffolding, presentation, and practice. What we've got works pretty well, but progress has been incremental and cumulative. What we had before worked less well, and what we had before that worked less well still.

Picture throwing out a complete text version of our current best practices, exposing it to the forces of memetic selection and evolution. Fragments would get seized upon, and quoted out of context; bits of it would get mixed up with this and that; things would be presented out of order and read out of order; people would skip and skim and possibly completely ignore sections they THOUGHT they already knew because the title or the first paragraph seemed mundane or familiar. And there wouldn't be the strong selection pressure toward clarity and cohesion that we've been providing, top-down—instead, there would be selection pressures for what's memorable, pithy, or easily crystallized, none of which would be likely to drive the art forward and make the content BETTER. Each step away from our current best practices is much more likely to be a decrease in quality rather than an increase, and though you and others here on LW are likely to have the necessary curiosity and diligence to "do it right," that doesn't mean that the majority of people exposed to the memes in this way share your autodidactic rigor.

The third problem (related to the second) is idea inoculation. Having seen crappy, distorted versions of the CFAR curriculum (or having attempted to absorb it from text, and failed), a typical human would then be much, much less receptive to other, better explanations in the future. This is why, even within the context of the workshop, we often ask that participants not read the relevant sections of their workbooks until AFTER a given lecture or activity. I'm going to assume this is a familiar concept, and not spend too many words on it, but suffice it to say that I believe an uncanny valley version of our curriculum trending on the internet for one day could produce enough anti-rationality in the general population to counterbalance all of our efforts so far.

None of these problems are absolute in nature. The Sequences exist, and are known to be helpful. And clearly, Rainbow and Benito have gotten at least some value out of the writeups they've gleaned and assembled themselves. Again, there's nothing to stop others from having the same insights we've had, and there's nothing to stop a diligent autodidact from connecting scattered dots.

But they are statistical. They are real. They become quite scary, once you start talking big numbers of people and the free exchange of content-sans-context. And that's without even talking about other concerns like framing, signaling, inferential distance, etc. Lots of worms in this can.

So the question then becomes—what to do?

Thus far, CFAR hasn't had the cycles to spend time creating the (let's say) 80-20 version of their content. Remember that it's a fledgling startup with fewer than ten full-time staff members (when Pete and I were hired, it only had six). They were pouring every 60- and 70- and 80-hour week into trying to squeeze an extra percentage point of comprehension or efficacy out of every activity, every explanation. In other words, the objection wasn't fundamental (to the best of my understanding, which may be wrong) ... it was pragmatic. Creating packaged material fit for the general public wasn't anywhere near the top of the list, which was headed by "create material that's actually epistemically sound and demonstrably effective."

For my own part, I think this belongs in our near future. I think it's an area to be approached cautiously, in incremental steps with lots of data collection, but yes—I'd like to see some of our simpler, core techniques made broadly available. I'd like to see scalability in the things we think we can actually explain on paper. And if it goes well, I'd like to see more and more of it. I'm personally taking steps in this direction (tackling and improving our written content is one of my primary tasks, and I've started with simple things like drafting a glossary and tracking which definitions leave the reader confused (or worse, confident but wrong)).

But we have to a) find the time and manpower to actually run the experiment, and b) find content that genuinely works. Those are both non-trivially difficult, and they're both trading off against the continued expansion and improvement of our version of the art of rationality. I've only just now taken on enough responsibility myself to free up a few of the core staff's hours—and that's mostly gone into reducing their workload from insane to merely crazy. It hasn't actually created sufficient surplus to allow online tutorials to meet the threshold for worth-the-risks.

In short, despite Crux's entirely appropriate and reasonable skepticism, the answer has to be (for the immediate future)—either you find us trustworthy, or you don't (and if you don't, maybe you don't want our material anyway?). I, for one, don't think published material threatens workshop revenue, any more than online tutorials threaten martial arts dojos. There will always be obvious benefits to attending an intensive, collaborative workshop with instructors who know what they're doing, and there will always be people who recognize that the value is worth the cost, particularly given our track record. Our reasons for having refrained from publication thus far aren't monetary (or, to be more precise, money isn't in the top five on what's actually a fairly long and considered list).

Instead, it's that we actually care about getting it right. We don't want to poison the well, we don't want to break the very thing we're trying to protect, and as a member of a group with something that at least resembles expertise (if you don't want to credit us as actual experts), I think that requires a lot more work on our end, first.

That being said, if you have questions about the content above, or about what CFAR is doing this week and this month and this year, or if you're struggling with creating the art of rationality yourself and you've had novel and interesting insights—

Well. You know where to find us, and we don't know where to find you, or we'd have already reached out.

Hope this helps,

• Duncan