Good question! I also had it earlier this year, so I studied him, and here is what I learned of Dan:
Dan is workshop staff at most of the workshops we run, including AIRCS workshops, mainlines, and other programs like instructor training. So, for ~16 weeks of 2019, he was helping run, teaching at, and doing ops at workshops.
Dan is also in charge of all our spreadsheets and data and everything that happens after a workshop: synthesizing the feedback we get from attendees, putting attendees into follow-up groups, pairing people with mentors, and sending out exercises.
Dan is in charge of our impact reports. This involves figuring out what to measure and how to measure it, doing the actual measuring, and then writing about it in a way that hopefully people understand. Dan decides what he looks into based on his own judgements and the questions funders and our exec team have. He’s currently working on metrics data for the fundraiser that will be out soon.
Dan is a general CFAR staff member. This means he contributes to our weekly colloquia with thoughts about rationality, interviews people for workshops, does follow-ups with participants, and other random projects.
At the risk of sounding trite: stay fun, stay interested, stay fresh, and stay sane! We want the people we bring on and the culture that surrounds us to be a good place to be for epistemics and also for people.
We have a bunch of instructor candidates that I am very excited about. One of the ones I am most excited about strikes me as an intellectual offspring of the Sequences, and he’s rocking it. I would like to encounter more people like him, so I hope this community continues to make good, strong, “what odds would you give me”, rationalists that are interested in teaching and curriculum development.
We would also like more thoughts on how different mental tech breaks and how to create reason-based, healthy communities with better immune systems that do not break. Partial clues most welcome, especially if you write them up as readable LW posts and email us so we can read the discussion :)
If you have ideas of something particular you want to do or add, reach out to us. We are looking for someone to do metrics with Dan. We are looking for particularly skilled computer scientists to attend the AIRCS program. We are potentially looking for a couple summer interns. We are looking for someone with a lot of professional high level ops experience and a good dose of common sense.
We also *just happen to be* running a fundraiser right now!