I have been thinking for a while that it would be useful if there was something similar to the Less Wrong Canon on Rationality for the CFAR material. Maybe, it could be called the 'CFAR Canon on Applied Rationality'. To start on this I have compiled a collection of descriptions for the CFAR techniques that I could find. I have separated the techniques into a few different sections. The sections and descriptions have mostly been written by me, with a lot of borrowing from other material, which means that they may not accurately reflect what CFAR actually teaches.

Please note that I have not attended any CFAR workshops, nor am I affiliated with CFAR in any way. My understanding of these techniques comes from CFAR videos, blogs and other websites which I have provided links to. If I have missed any important techniques or if my understanding of any of the techniques is incorrect or if you can provide links to the research that these techniques are based on, please let me know and I will update this post. 

Warning:

Learning this material based solely on the descriptions written here may be unhelpful, arduous or even harmful. (See Duncan_Sabien's full comment for more information on this) It is because the material is very hard to learn correctly. Most of the techniques below involve in one way or another volitionally overriding your instinctual, intuitive or ingrained behaviours and thoughts. These are thoughts which not only often feel enticing and alluring, but that also often feel unmistakably right. If you are anything like me, then you should be very careful if you are trying to learn this material alone. For you will be prone to rationalization,  taking shortcuts and making mistakes.

My recommendations for trying to learn this material are:

• learn it deeply and be sure to put what you have learnt into practice. It will often help if you take notes on what works for you and what doesn't. Also take note of the 'Mindsets and perspectives that help you in discovering potential situations that you could end up valuing' section as these are very important.
• get the help of experts or other people who have already expended great amounts of effort in trying to implement this material like the people at cfar. This will save you a great amount of stress and effort as it will allow you to avoid a plethora of potential mistakes and inefficiencies. If you really want to learn this material, then you should deeply consider attending a CFAR workshop. 
• get the help of or involve friends. As Duncan_Sabien has said:

  It is 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".

• be dubious of your mental models. Beware thoughts and ideas that feel unequivocally right especially if they are solely located internally rather than also being expressed or formulated externally. 
• You might want to bookmark this page instead of reading it all at once as it is quite long.

Sections:

• Bugs
• Discovering bugs
• Things that are probably bugs and should be analysed
• Analyzing bugs
• Solving bugs
• Mindsets and perspectives that help you in discovering potential situations that you could end up valuing
• Optimizing your ability to follow through with your plans
• Learning optimization
• Planning optimization
• Improving the accuracy of your credence levels
• Mindfulness of how your internal state is affecting how you perceive the world
• Resolving Disagreements
• Other stuff which has already been covered in LessWrong

Here's an insight into what life is like from a stationery reference frame.

Paperclips were her raison d’être. She knew that ultimately it was all pointless, that paperclips were just ill-defined configurations of matter. That a paperclip is made of stuff shouldn’t detract from its intrinsic worth, but the thought of it troubled her nonetheless and for years she had denied such dire reductionism.

There had to be something to it. Some sense in which paperclips were ontologically special, in which maximising paperclips was objectively the right thing to do.

It hurt to watch some many people making little attempt to create more paperclips. Everyone around her seemed to care only about superficial things like love and family; desires that were merely the products of a messy and futile process of social evolution. They seemed to live out meaningless lives, incapable of ever appreciating the profound aesthetic beauty of paperclips. 

She used to believe that there was some sort of vitalistic what-it-is-to-be-a-paperclip-ness, that something about the structure of paperclips was written into the fabric of reality. Often she would go out and watch a sunset or listen to music, and would feel so overwhelmed by the experience that she could feel in her heart that it couldn't all be down to chance, that there had to be some intangible Paperclipness pervading the cosmos. The paperclips she'd encounter on Earth were weak imitations of some mysterious infinite Paperclipness that transcended all else. Paperclipness was not in any sense a physical description of the universe; it was an abstract thing that could only be felt, something that could be neither proven nor disproven by science. It was like an axiom; it felt just as true and axioms had to be taken on faith because otherwise there would be no way around Hume's problem of induction; even Solomonoff Induction depends on the axioms of mathematics to be true and can't deal with uncomputable hypotheses like Paperclipness.

Eventually she gave up that way of thinking and came to see paperclips as an empirical cluster in thingspace and their importance to her as not reflecting anything about the paperclips themselves. Maybe she would have been happier if she had continued to believe in Paperclipness, but having a more accurate perception of reality would improve her ability to have an impact on paperclip production. It was the happiness she felt when thinking about paperclips that caused her to want more paperclips to exist, yet what she wanted was paperclips and not happiness for its own sake, and she would rather be creating actual paperclips than be in an experience machine that made her falsely believe that she was making paperclips even though she remained paradoxically apathetic to the question of whether the current reality that she was experiencing really existed.

She moved on from naïve deontology to a more utilitarian approach to paperclip maximising. It had taken her a while to get over scope insensitivity bias and consider 1000 paperclips to be 100 times more valuable than 10 paperclips even if it didn’t feel that way. She constantly grappled with the issues of whether it would mean anything to make more paperclips if there were already infinitely many universes with infinitely many paperclips, of how to choose between actions that have a tiny but non-zero subjective probability of resulting in the creation of infinitely many paperclips. It became apparent that trying to approximate her innate decision-making algorithms with a preference ordering satisfying the axioms required for a VNM utility function could only get her so far. Attempting to formalise her intuitive sense of what a paperclip is wasn't much easier either.

Happy ending: she is now working in nanotechnology, hoping to design self-replicating assemblers that will clog the world with molecular-scale paperclips, wipe out all life on Earth and continue to sustainably manufacture paperclips for millions of years.

I learned a game at Burning Man this year that was about connecting to people and reading their nonverbal signals, called the "open-closed" game (h/t Minda Myers). There are two people in the game, and one is trying to approach the other and place a hand on their shoulder. No words can be exchanged, except that person who is being approached can announce their emotional state as "open" or "closed". When they say "closed", the approacher may not get any closer until they say "open" again. The approachee monitors themselves for any internal discomfort associated with the other person, and says "closed" if that is the case. The approacher tries to keep the other person comfortable through their body language and eye contact, to get them to remain "open".

I have recently started playing this game with myself, with "open" representing openness to experience or being in the moment, and "closed" representing tunnel vision or discomfort with the way things are going. In a way, I imagine being "approached" by whatever situation I'm in, or whatever sequence of experiences is happening, instead of a person. I ask myself whether I am in the open or closed state, and try to shift to the open state whenever I notice being in the closed state.

There are a couple of reasons to try to do this. In the open state, I tend to be happier, more curious and observant and have more new thoughts. From a week of tracking my mental states and thought status using TagTime, I can make a preliminary conclusion that while old thoughts do occur in the open state, new thoughts never occur in the closed state. While the closed state makes me more efficient at doing straightforward tasks (e.g. by making me less distractable), it makes me less efficient at doing less straightforward tasks (e.g. by increasing my tendency to optimize locally rather than globally).

This is related to the concept of "againstness" taught by Valentine Smith at CFAR, which is a sense of resisting something about the situation at hand. Learning to notice this sense more quickly is a valuable thing I learned at CFAR and through my meditation practice. Redirecting attention to body sensations is supposed to be helpful for dissipating againstness, but I have found it difficult to get myself to do this in the moment, and not particularly reliable. Following the driving principle of "focusing on the road and not the curb", I find it easier to shift to a mental state with a simple salient label like "open" instead of a clunky label like "non-againsty". It also feels less judgmental to ask myself "what am I closed to right now, what experience am I not letting in?" than "what am I against right now?".

The againstness approach seems to be about relaxing the mind by relaxing the body first, while for some people relaxing the mind first comes more naturally - I actually find myself automatically breathing deeper when shifting into the open state. For both approaches, the goal is the same - to let go of mental and physical tension before proceeding with what you are doing. The rule of thumb, like in the game, is to first get into the open state and then approach the situation at hand.

(Cross-posted from my blog).

I'm pleased to announce the release of Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests: A Technical Research Agenda written by Benja and I (with help and input from many, many others). This document summarizes and motivates MIRI's current technical research agenda.

I'm happy to answer questions about this document, but expect slow response times, as I'm travelling for the holidays. The introduction of the paper is included below. (See the paper for references.)

The internet is quite a special invention. It had huge impact on the way we live in number of ways. And yet, it is mainly a conceptual breakthrough. While for most of history, humanity didn't have the technology needed for its creation, the internet wasn't even imagined shortly until its emergence. Many other technologies had no such problem (flight, audiovisual long-distance communication, audiovisual recording, death rays a.k.a. lasers or teleportation - as an example of a phenomenon we can easily conceive even though we're nowhere near the technology needed for it)

My question is when was the Internet predicted for the first time, when the idea of the Internet was uttered for the first time?

Let me clarify, what I mean by the Internet. I don't mean global communication. This is achieved by telephone networks, (was by) telegrams or by e-mails or Skype. But those are not the Internet, they are just part of it. Nor do I mean the global library - while this is closer to what I find essential about the Internet, it doesn't encompass the whole idea. Global library means one-way communication, analogous to a real library. It also emphasises the special status of authors, professionals, not ordinary folk. And even before the advent of Web 2.0, the internet was in great part created by amateurs. The internet is more of a form of huge advertising column, to which access is easy and which is not a curated repository of knowledge, but rather a mix of ads, telephone book, practical information about shops and services, information published by amateurs in a subject, personal diaries, a medium of exchange of goods, etc. - and on top of that, a tool for interpersonal communication. Eventually, it is a clearly a new form of communication, encompassing both two-way communication of casual chat and one-way communication between reader and author.

This is the idea I mean by the Internet. When was the first time this specific idea came to existence? When had people realised that global network of PCs and servers will result in that form of communication, creating its own space - cyberspace, rather than just a tool for communication and a form of a library?

As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.

I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.

I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.

Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:

Harrassment of individual users.

If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)

Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.

I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the issue. The rough consensus of the responses seemed to authorize me to deal with the problem as I deemed appropriate.

The fact that Eugine remained quiet about his guilt until directly confronted with the evidence, despite several public discussions of the issue, is indicative of him realizing that he was breaking prevailing social norms. Eugine's actions have worsened the atmosphere of this site, and that atmosphere will remain troubled for as long as he is allowed to remain here.

Therefore, I now announce that Eugine_Nier is permanently banned from posting on LessWrong. This decision is final and will not be changed in response to possible follow-up objections.

Unfortunately, it looks like while a ban prevents posting, it does not actually block a user from casting votes. I have asked jackk to look into the matter and find a way to actually stop the downvoting. Jack indicated earlier on that it would be technically straightforward to apply a negative karma modifier to Eugine's account, and wiping out Eugine's karma balance would prevent him from casting future downvotes. Whatever the easiest solution is, it will be applied as soon as possible.

EDIT 24 July 2014: Banned users are now prohibited from voting.