CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype
Summary: We outline CFAR’s purpose, our history in 2014, and our plans heading into 2015.
- Highlights from 2014.
- Improving operations.
- Attempts to go beyond the current workshop and toward the ‘full prototype’ of CFAR: our experience in 2014 and plans for 2015.
- Nuts, bolts, and financial details.
- The big picture and how you can help.
One of the reasons we’re publishing this review now is that we’ve just launched our annual matching fundraiser, and want to provide the information our prospective donors need for deciding. This is the best time of year to decide to donate to CFAR. Donations up to $120k will be matched until January 31.[1]
To briefly preview: For the first three years of our existence, CFAR mostly focused on getting going. We followed the standard recommendation to build a ‘minimum viable product’, the CFAR workshops, that could test our ideas and generate some revenue. Coming into 2013, we had a workshop that people liked (9.3 average rating on “Are you glad you came?”; a more recent random survey showed 9.6 average rating on the same question 6-24 months later), which helped keep the lights on and gave us articulate, skeptical, serious learners to iterate on. At the same time, the workshops are not everything we would want in a CFAR prototype; it feels like the current core workshop does not stress-test most of our hopes for what CFAR can eventually do. The premise of CFAR is that we should be able to apply the modern understanding of cognition to improve people’s ability to (1) figure out the truth (2) be strategically effective (3) do good in the world. We have dreams of scaling up some particular kinds of sanity. Our next goal is to build the minimum strategic product that more directly justifies CFAR’s claim to be an effective altruist project.[2]
Upcoming CFAR events: Lower-cost bay area intro workshop; EU workshops; and others
For anyone who's interested:
CFAR is trying out an experimental, lower-cost, 1.5-day introductory workshop Oct 25-26 in the bay area. It is meant to provide an easier point of entry into our rationality training. If you've been thinking about coming to a CFAR workshop but have had trouble setting aside 4 days and $3900, you might consider trying this out. (Or, if you have a friend or family member in that situaiton, you might suggest this to them.) It's a beta test, so no guarantees as to the outcome -- but I suspect it'll be both useful, and a lot of fun.
We are also finally making it to Europe. We'll be running two workshops in the UK this November, both of which have both space and financial aid still available.
We're also still running our standard workshops: Jan 16-19 in Berkeley, and April 23-26 in Boston, MA. (We're experimenting, also, with using alumni "TA's" to increase the amount of 1-on-1 informal instruction while simultaneously increasing workshop size, in an effort to scale our impact.)
Finally, we're actually running a bunch of events lately for alumni of our 4-day workshops (a weekly rationality dojo; a bimonthly colloquium; a yearly alumni reunion; and various for-alumni workshops); which is perhaps less exciting if you aren't yet an alumnus, but which I'm very excited about because it suggests that we'll have a larger community of people doing serious practice, and thereby pushing the boundaries of the art of rationality.
If anyone wishes to discuss any of these events, or CFAR's strategy as a whole, I'd be glad to talk; you can book me here.
Cheers!
Why CFAR?
Summary: We outline the case for CFAR, including:
CFAR is in the middle of our annual matching fundraiser right now. If you've been thinking of donating to CFAR, now is the best time to decide for probably at least half a year. Donations up to $150,000 will be matched until January 31st; and Matt Wage, who is matching the last $50,000 of donations, has vowed not to donate unless matched.[1]
Our workshops are cash-flow positive, and subsidize our basic operations (you are not subsidizing workshop attendees). But we can't yet run workshops often enough to fully cover our core operations. We also need to do more formal experiments, and we want to create free and low-cost curriculum with far broader reach than the current workshops. Donations are needed to keep the lights on at CFAR, fund free programs like the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition, and let us do new and interesting things in 2014 (see below, at length).[2]
Meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City
Discussion article for the meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City
Three of us from CFAR are hosting a meetup from 1pm to 3pm at
656 N Columbus Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84103.
Fun, games, and rationality conversations! You might also bring your dad; dads get a free cupcake in honor of father's day.
Discussion article for the meetup : CFAR visits Salt Lake City
Want to have a CFAR instructor visit your LW group?
Cat, who has volunteered extensively at CFAR (and taught at CFAR), will be visiting many cities in Europe over the coming months.
She is awesome.
Also, the list of cities that she is visiting will probably be determined in the next few days.
If you'd like to have her visit your LW meetup group, share some of our classes with your meetup, and generally bring connections back and forth... comment below, or PM her (or me)! I suspect this can be a lot of fun, and useful as well. Offers of couch space and similar are also appreciated.
For now this is just for Europe, probably, but no harm in touching base from other cities as well; it's possible she'll visit elsewhere later.
CFAR is hiring a logistics manager
CFAR is hiring an additional logistics manager. Please click on our form for more information, or to fill out an application:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ACTvM1oYsw1zzHMumrLzffCVVak3eA5A-5uJzyIYOKM/viewform
We hope to choose a candidate within the next week or so, so if you're interested, do apply ASAP.
Applied Rationality Workshops: Jan 25-28 and March 1-4
The Center for Applied Rationality is running two more four-day workshops: Jan 25-28 and March 1-4 in the SF bay area. Like the previous workshop, these sessions are targeted at ambitious, analytic people who have broad intellectual interests, and who care about making real-world projects work. Less Wrong veterans and Less Wrong newcomers alike are welcome: as discussed below, we are intentionally bringing together folks with varied backgrounds and skill bases.
Workshop details:
Nov 16-18: Rationality for Entrepreneurs
CFAR is taking LW-style rationality into the world, this month, with a new kind of rationality camp: Rationality for Entrepreneurs. It is aimed at ambitious, relatively successful folk (regardless of whether they are familiar with LW), who like analytic thinking and care about making practical real-world projects work. Some will be paying for themselves; others will be covered by their companies.
If you'd like to learn rationality in a more practical context, consider applying. Also, if you were hoping to introduce rationality and related ideas to a friend/acquaintance who fits the bill, please talk to them about the workshop, both for their sake and to strengthen the rationality community.
The price will be out of reach for some: the workshop costs $3.9k. But there is a money-back guarantee. Some partial scholarships may be available. This fee buys participants:
- Four nights and three days at a retreat center, with small classes, interactive exercises, and much opportunity for unstructured conversation that applies the material at meals and during the evenings (room and board is included);
- One instructor for every three participants;
- Six weeks of Skype/phone and email follow-up, to help participants make the material into regular habits, and navigate real-life business and personal situations with these tools.
CFAR is planning future camps which are more directly targeted at a Less Wrong audience (like our previous camps), so don’t worry if this camp doesn’t seem like the right fit for you (because of cost, interests, etc.). There will be others. But if you or someone you know does have an entrepreneurial bent[1], then we strongly recommend applying to this camp rather than waiting. Attendees will be surrounded by other ambitious, successful, practically-minded folks, learn from materials that have been tailored to entrepreneurial issues, and receive extensive follow-up to help apply what they’ve learned to their businesses and personal lives.
Our schedule is below.
(See also the thread about the camp on Hacker News.)
Checklist of Rationality Habits
Possible meetup: Singapore
Are there any Singaporean LW-ers out there? I'll be visiting Singapore for a few days with my husband, Carl Shulman, and we'd be keen to either have a short meet-up in a coffee shop somewhere, or to see Singaporean sites while talking to a LWer or two. Please comment or pm me if you're interested. We get in noon this Thursday (tomorrow), and leave the morning of Sunday, the 26th.
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