As there are many people here here who attended CFAR workshops, I wanted to ask, if you understand why there are no online workshops, even when the in-person workshops were not possible due to the pandemic. In my experience, everything that does not require physical contact (like martial arts) can be taught online. There can be some inconveniences, of course, but if planned well, it can work quite smoothly. I can think about very small amount of reasons, and none of them seems persuasive to me.
1. Maybe CFAR workshop indeed requires physical contact? Sounds quite strange.
2. Maybe organizers are not good with technologies and don't know how to do different Zoom rooms, how to make parties in Mozilla Hubs etc.? Maybe they have never heard about properly organized online schools? Sounds even less likely.
3. Maybe CFAR workshop requires full embedding with no distraction? Well, it can be clarified in the announcement as a requirement for the participants, and for many people, it is certainly a possible thing to do.
4. Maybe CFAR somehow got into a death spiral and turned into something like Lifespring? I would hope it is unlikely in the rationalistic community, but here is more hope than actual belief.
I can understand your point, but I am not persuaded yet. Let me maybe clarify why. During the year and a half of COVID, the in-person workshops were not possible. During this time, there were people, who would strongly benefit from the workshop, and the workshop would be helpful at this time (for example, they were making a career choice). Some of them can allow private places for the time of the workshop. It seems that for them, during this time the online workshop would be certainly more beneficial than no workshop at all. Moreover, conducting at least one online workshop would be a good experiment that would give useful information. It is totally not obvious to me why the priors that "online workshop is useless or harmful, taking into account opportunity cost" are so high that this experiment should not be conducted.
Yes, I hope someone from CFAR can maybe explain it better to me.