Donate by Jan 31 and double your impact!

“CFAR was instrumental in the birth of the Future of Life Institute: 4 of our 5 co-founders are CFAR alumni, and seeing so many talented idealistic people motivated to make the world more rational gave me confidence that we could succeed with our audacious goals.”

— MIT Professor Max Tegmark, cosmologist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, recent recipient of a $10 million donation from Elon Musk for research into artificial intelligence safety and robustness

Humanity cannot foresee every challenge facing us in the coming decades. But what we can say with confidence is that our future looks far brighter if it contains people who possess not only raw intelligence and good intentions, but something more. People who are skilled at weighing evidence, and risks; who subject their own beliefs to scrutiny, yet don’t lose their drive; who understand the biases built into the human brain; who are attuned to their emotions and intuitions, but not ruled by them.

This is the mission of the Center for Applied Rationality: to develop, test, and teach the art of effective decision-making, for individuals and for the world.

And right now, your support for that mission makes an exceptional difference. From now through January 31, 2015, all donations to CFAR up to $120,000 will be matched one-for-one by several generous supporters*.

“It’s important for our future to have researchers and innovators with strong rationality skills, who can think about risks, and make solid plans and follow through on them. That’s why I’m sponsoring math and science Olympiad winners from my country, Estonia, to attend CFAR’s workshops.”

— Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, Kazaa, Metamed, and CSER

If you have any questions about our plans, our history, or our mission, you can read on, or click below to schedule a call with our Executive Director, Anna Salamon. She’ll be happy to talk, and our app will help you find a time that’s convenient for you:

Anna Salamon

Executive Director and Cofounder

Over the last year, the Center for Applied Rationality…

Went global. In 2014, we brought our workshops outside the United States for the first time, running two four-day workshops in Australia and two in the UK.
Built community. We held our first ever annual alumni reunion this year, started running a weekly rationality dojo for CFAR alumni, and offered beta versions of several new advanced workshops oriented towards alums. Our alumni community has grown stronger than ever.
Ran nine more four-day workshops, and further optimized our curriculum, with a particular focus on curriculum for forming true beliefs, and for helping the intuitive brain form true beliefs. We also experimented toward methods for getting this content into a more widely accessible form — giving free talks with condensed versions of our content, testing a lower-cost 1.5-day workshop, and talking with an agent about a possible book.
Optimized our operations. We put significant effort towards improving our processes and systems– efforts that are now paying off in terms of increased ability for CFAR to carry out its activities and make plans for the future.
Became more visible. 2014 saw several articles about CFAR in the media, including coverage in Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and The Reasoner.
Ran our third annual SPARC (Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition), a free summer camp for mathematically gifted high-schoolers. We nearly doubled in size this year, now hosting 40 students. Check out our video below for more information:

Your donations can make the next steps in our mission possible, and help create a well-tested art of rationality to give to the individuals and institutions whose decisions will be determining the course of our world’s future. We’d greatly appreciate your support, especially right now during our matching drive when it goes twice as far. Click below to find out how to donate to CFAR, and invest through us in the future:

“I’m co-president of an effective altruism student group at Harvard. Rationality training helped me create and successfully execute a plan to vastly increase our campus presence–everything from making uncomfortable cold calls to powering through bureaucracy, and from running complex events to quickly updating on feedback. So far our progress has been amazing, and I credit a lot of this success to CFAR’s excellent material.”

— Ben Kuhn, Harvard Mathematics Class of 2015

Our heartfelt thanks, and happy holidays, from everyone at CFAR.

*$120,000 of total matching funds has been generously pledged by: Peter McCluskey, Jesse Liptrap, Nick Tarleton, Stephanie Zolayvar, Arram Sabeti, Liron Shapira, Ben Hoskin, Eric Rogstad, Matt Graves, Alyssa Vance, Topher Hallquist, and John Clasby.

The Center for Applied Rationality is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Questions? We’d love to talk — contact CFAR’s president, Julia Galef, to set up a short Skype conversation about CFAR, what we’re trying to accomplish, where money goes, volunteer opportunities, and related questions.

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