Community and organisation are two different things. A community by it's nature contains people from different organisations.

Fair enough, the question was unclear. I've changed it to (I hope) better reflect what I wanted to ask: Would you like the European rationality community efforts to be centered around some particular research topics (e.g. AI)?

As such it's not something that's usually decided in a top-down way.

E.g. what initially set events in motion in Berkeley seems to have been mostly MIRI-related research, not explicit community building. And it seems very possible to choose this kind of focus top-down.

A perfect example of a fully general counter-argument!

His reply was, "Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you."

This is a good example of optimizing for the wrong goal.

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?

I had a very similar thought to this post. So similar in fact that I went ahead and wrote a kind of user guide for each CFAR's techniques (though it has changed a great deal even in the last 4 months since I finished writing). I also have never been to a CFAR workshop and drew on many of the same online sources that you have. It took about a month to compile of working in my spare time. My motivation for doing so was the cost of attending a workshop (financially and time costs) were simply too high for someone in my position overseas.

I've printed it and only use it personally. I've never shared it other than with one close friend. I'm concerned about you posting this now, for the same reasons that stopped me from sharing my compilation even though I could see a great deal of benefit in it.

My thoughts for not sharing it are,

1. 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.

2. 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.

In your floor-sweeping example, I agree that you cannot scale previous solutions to 10^25. And I agree that you need very novel thoughts to solve that larger problem, that involve the ability to come up with new ideas and build things from them.

Could you give a concrete example of how 'rationality skills' fits into that picture, and point at a mechanism by which getting better at these skills causes you to be able to solve the 10^25 level problem?

Yup, the correct next thing to say is "I am entirely unconvinced that the practice of taking down Chesterton fences is a process which seems well established and has a decent track record".

But you could say "And by the above, I will remove this Chesterton fence."

That only works if there is a mechanism for getting rid of CEOs who abuse their power. See comment above. Also note, that the victims of said abuse are generally not in a position to defend themselves.

I am not saying it wasn't a worthwhile effort (and I agreed to help look into this data, right?) I am just saying if your definition of "resounding success" is one that cannot be used to market this workshop in the future, that definition is a little peculiar...

In general, it's hard to find effects of anything in the data.

Positive reinforcement for being so open about your spending.

$89 donated.

My first donation to you, and it shall not be my last.