This seems very interesting, and it's really cool that you've already been working on it. To clarify, you said you don't eat or drink anything unless it's a reward. Does this mean halting all meals?

How do you manage to eat healthily if all food has to stay within arm's reach? I suppose some fruits could stay out, but what about cooked meats or vegetables?

What do you do for recreation times: hanging out with others, visiting relatives, or just going to the beach or something, etc?

Why do you advertise for Goodsearch? As far as I can tell, Goodsearch itself is a for-profit LLC that makes it's money by drawing referrals to Yahoo, by way of putting kittens and children on it's front page and making people feel good about doing searches. They're just trading a portion of revenue for increased marketshare.

But you're trading time. You earn 1 cent a search; at minimum wage, that's 5 seconds of labor time. Rough estimate of their criteria says that less than half my searches would be eligible for donation. So, in order for Goodsearch to be worth it, I'd need to be able to find what exactly I'm looking for on Yahoo no more than 2.5 seconds slower than Google/DuckDuckGo. A quick Yahoo search shows that to be off... probably by at least an order of magnitude. If you think you'd personally get better results than that though, by all means go ahead.

Time has value too, and that's what you're spending when you switch to Goodsearch.

The labeling isn't very confusing right now, but in 9 months it will be.

Woah. Instead of potato chips, I could be eating an equal amount of bacon.

I'm never going to eat another potato chip again.

Regarding whitespace, I usually like this style of spacing in articles. It makes it much easier to see what's going on and identify clusters of ideas.
It's like punctuation for paragraphs!

In this case, however, the whitespace seemed to have been placed at random and did not separate ideas.

Are you suggesting that rationality takes the same level of one-on-one contact that dancing does?

I'm sure it wouldn't be too much trouble to go out and find rationality partners, if that's what it took. I'd still need the curriculum though.

I can see the usefulness of networking. Though I don't feel like I'm in the phase of my life where I'd want to go to such lengths just to network and have excellent conversations. I could imagine that being worthwhile enough to me one day.

It's good to hear about the followups. They mentioned that in the original post, but I didn't know how extensive it was. I suppose it's unfair to demand concrete data, when dealing with such small sample sizes.

Reference class tennis, but I did learn dancing via youtube + a partner. A couple of years of dance classes were pretty useless compared to how much I learned after a month of study online.

I have a couple of questions:
1) Does the $3900 cost primarily cover the cost of the workshop itself, or is it mostly used as a revenue source for CFAR to keep the doors open year-round?

2) What advantages does the weekend retreat system offer that other systems don't, specifically distance learning?

3) Are there any plans to expand into distance learning, for example into the Khan Academy, edX, Udacity model?

Everything you've mentioned sounds great, but I'm inherently skeptical of a weekend retreat format. After all, even gay cure camps 'work' and have their testimonials; how do you control for the self-help effect? Additionally, it seems odd to me to be building a program around teaching rationality in-person, when every other educational institution is trying to move in the opposite direction. I'm just curious about why you've chosen to structure the program the way it is.

That's a list of lingo the people who do that use. I'm missing your objections, unless you just hate lingo.

We may be talking across from each other by using different terms.

To me PUA is one very simply algorithm: attempt pickup -> analyze if it worked -> improve pickup routine -> goto start. PUA is the treating of relationships and dating as if it was a science or skillset instead of an interaction with individual human being. That's all there is to PUA. It's nothing but a learning algorithm used by a human and backed up by the data you collect.

The statement that "PUA is true" means that humans can be modeled in relationships the same way that humans can be modeled economically for economics to be true. The statment "PUA works" means that this algorithm will get you success and it will give you increasing probabilities of success per attempt.

There are some universally adopted techniques and a couple of common models, but that's to be expected when you've got thousands of people all doing the exact same thing repeatedly. In general, I'd say the vast majority of those models and techniques are accurate and efficacious. If you have specific objections to PUA half truths, feel free to throw them out. Saying that PUA is nothing but half truths feels as general as saying that economics is nothing but half truths because it can't model economic agents perfectly. I need specifics.

As for "dark" techniques, I have no idea to what you refer. The darkness I was talking about in PUA is the the danger of dehumanizing others and treating women as commodities. You stop looking at women as a person and start looking at them as potential lay #32. There are no dark techniques that cause harm to the target; they're harmed because you have a one night stand and then never call them again (as their best case scenario). The darkness isn't a side effect; it's the direct effect. Achieving your goal by any other technique wouldn't spare them the pain.