Actually trying to figure things out

Jul 18, 2017 - Pete Michaud

Second Quarter CFAR Newsletter

(Cross posted from our alumni mailing list) Hello again! The second quarter of 2017 has come and gone, so it’s time for an update about what CFAR has been up to and what we’re planning. If you missed our newsletter last quarter, here’s a link to catch up! What We Did Finished Workshop Sprint - We finished the last 2 workshops of our 5 workshop sprint! From February through early May we...

First Quarter CFAR Newsletter

(Cross posted from our alumni mailing list) Hey everyone! 2017 has been a busy year for CFAR so far, I’d like to tell you some of what we’ve been up to, and some of the plans we have for the rest of the year. Accomplishments Instructor Pipeline - Last year Duncan Sabien took on the substantial project of creating a system to train a growing number of new, fully-qualified CFAR...

Double Crux — A Strategy for Resolving Disagreement

(Cross posted to LessWrong) Preamble Double crux is one of CFAR’s newer concepts, and one that’s forced a re-examination and refactoring of a lot of our curriculum (in the same way that the introduction of TAPs and Inner Simulator did previously). It rapidly became a part of our organizational social fabric, and is one of our highest-EV threads for outreach and dissemination, so it’s long overdue for a public, formal...

Grant from Open Philanthropy Project

The Open Philanthropy Project recently announced a grant to CFAR for $1,035,000 across the next two years, earmarked toward a combination of improving our organizational competence, providing scholarships for promising effective altruists and similar folk to attend CFAR workshops, and assisting with SPARC and EuroSPARC. We very much appreciate the grant, and we are looking forward to putting it to work improving CFAR and streamlining SPARC operations. (We recently ran...

Deliberate Grad School

A useful post from CFAR co-founder Andrew Critch's personal blog describes how to get the most out of graduate school -- especially if you want to maximize your positive impact on the world. Sample tip (this is 1 of 8): Find a flexible program. PhD programs in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, and theoretical computer science tend to give you a great deal of free time and flexibility, provided you can pass...

Insights from the alumni reunion

Is it my imagination, or is there something about being in windswept landscapes -- especially by the water -- that makes it so much easier to come up with new insights? Last month over 100 CFAR alumni from around the world converged on Asilomar State Beach, on the edge of Northern California, for our second annual reunion. And I know I wasn't the only one whose frequency of exclaiming, "Whoa!...

Workshops

4-day immersive trainings in applied rationality; form accurate beliefs; learn to get these accurate beliefs into the parts of your mind that affect motivation; explore the edges of your comfort zone.

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October 25 - October 29, 2017

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January 24 - January 28, 2018

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Reviews

"I went to the July workshop. I think it was probably the most useful week of my life in terms of exposure to things I could be doing to be more productive and effective."

— Ben Toner, CEO of Draftable

"As a founder of a company with a similar mission to CFAR’s – making people more awesome – ... CFAR’s Rationality for Entrepreneurs workshop did not disappoint."

— Daniel Reeves, Co-Founder of Beeminder

Number of workshop alumni

909 and counting

Average participant rating based on the question "Are you glad you came?"

9.2 out of 10

Increased life satisfaction

0.17σ after 1 year