(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our workshops, as well as our fundraiser, at What’s going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser and at More details on CFAR's new workshops)

In part of that post, we discuss the main thing that bothered me about our past workshop and why I think it is probably fixed now (though we’re still keeping an eye out). Here, I list the biggest remaining known troubles with our workshops and our other major workshop-related todo items.

Your thoughts as to what’s really up with these and how to potentially address them (or what cheap investigations might get us useful info) are most welcome.

Ambiguous impact on health 

(Current status: ?)

In the 2012-2020 workshops, our “CFAR techniques” seemed to help people do 5-minute-timer or insight-based things, but seemed to some of us to make it harder, or at least not easier, to eg:

• Get physical exercise
• Learn slow and unglamorous things from textbooks across an extended time^[1]
• Be happy and hard-working at a day job in a slow and stable way

This seems unfortunate.

I’m mildly hopeful the changes we’ve made to our new workshops will also help with this. My reasons for hope:

1. Our old workshop had a hyper/agitated/ungrounded energy running through it: “do X and you can be cool and rational like HPMOR!Harry”; “do X and you can maybe help with whether we’ll all die.” Our current workshop is quieter (“now that you’ve thought of X, does it feel inside-view-hopeful to try X some? Now that you’ve tried it some, does it feel inside-view-hopeful to do more?”). I’m hoping the quieter thing is less likely to drown out other useful work-and-morale-flows.
2. We now aim to teach skills for tuning into the (surprisingly detailed) processes that make possible the cool structures around us, including those that one has already been running without explicitly knowing why.

However, I won’t be surprised if this is still a problem. If so, we’ll need to fix it.

Unclear mechanism of action; lack of "piecewise checkability"

(Current status: unsolved)

Magic happens at the workshops (people seem to “wake up” a bit, look around, and e.g. notice they hate doing the ironing but could probably pay someone to do it, or they’re bored of their normal activities but can change them, or their parents may die someday and now is a good time to reach out, or their own habits are made of examinable, changeable pieces just like the outside world is. And this is great!). But afterwards, it’s hard (for them and for us) to describe the workshop and its mechanism of action to someone who hasn’t been there. Sometimes it’s even hard to describe to someone who has been there, if they’ve had years to forget.^[2]

The “hard to remember / hard to describe” property makes it difficult to know:

• Are there undesirable bits tagging along with the magic that it would be nice to delete?
• While there are rationality skills practiced at the workshops – is this core to how and why the workshops change people, or is it mostly something else?

People also sometimes wonder: are CFAR workshops just fun parties, dressed up as rationality training? I think they aren’t (and those who’ve wondered this aloud in my hearing mostly haven’t been to one).^[3] But:

1. I’d like to acquire an accurate, shared story of what aCFAR workshops are, and how they work, and how we know;
2. I’d like the ability to somehow check for bits of psychological or cultural change that might be tagging along with the workshop, and might be bad.

We at aCFAR don’t know how to do this. Yet.

Habits that make it easier for alumni to get pulled into cults 

(current status: ?)

As mentioned in our main post: if workshop guests practice deferring to us about what weird things to do with their minds, (especially if they do so for extended periods, based on wispy claims about long-term payoffs such as “this’ll help with AI risk somehow”), this risks setting some up to later try deferring to people running more obviously unhealthy cults. I speak from experience.

(My guess, too, is that our broader cultural influence may have spread some of this unfortunate pattern to the wider culture of the rationalist community, not just to alums. People would come to the workshop, observe a bunch of healthy normal-looking people having fun doing “rationality exercises,” and come away with the cultural belief that introspection and self-modification are cool, normal, and useful. Which they sometimes are. But we need more precision in the transmitted cultural pattern.)

We’ve got to find a way to make our workshops not set people up for bad patterns here. Our current emphasis on “remember the buck stops with you; check whether it is producing fruits you directly feel good about” may help. So may finding ways to maintain, as our and guests’ central focus, the discovery of checkable stuff in the outside world and/or the building of outside stuff with obvious feedback loops.

Outward-directedness

(current status: minor progress)

In addition to perhaps assisting with cult resistance, it would also be nice for other reasons if our workshops can become more outward-directed -- more about noticing and building neat things in the world, rather than pure introspection/self-modification.

More things I want for the workshops

Here are some additional things I would like to have (or have more of) at future CFAR workshops:

• “Multi-level classrooms” that better accommodate workshop guests with more expertise/experience instead of casting everyone as beginners
• More epistemic rationality content and a workshop context that helps that content register as relevant/good
• Further developing our new “honoring who-ness” thread and related new threads (we have several new classes in the works for our Jan workshop)
• Boosting guests’ skill in “the positive opposite of psychosis.”^[4]
• Making workshops more financially viable (via getting more workshop applicants at full price/closer to full price)
• Further increasing workshop zaniness/aliveness/etc.

1. ^{^}

   A SPARC instructor told me that the head of a different math program for young people had complained to him that SPARC or HPMOR seemed to mess up peoples’ ability to be deeply interested in textbooks, or other gradual acquisition of deep math knowledge, in favor of immediate cleverness / insights / reconceptualizations. (It’s been some years since I heard it; I might be botching the details a bit. Logan Strohl’s work on “tortoise skills” seems to me to be a response to independently noticing a similar need.)

2. ^{^}

   Thanks to Dan Keys for persistently raising this fact to my attention and convincing me of its importance.

3. ^{^}

   The reason I think workshops don't just work by being fun parties: alumni often have a characteristic "CFAR alumni" skillset they didn't come in with. For example, if most people attempt a task (e.g., to mow the lawn) and find it's not in their direct reach (e.g. because the lawnmower is broken and all nearby stores are closed for Thanksgiving), they'll decide it's impossible. If CFAR alumni are in the same situation, they may (sensibly) decide it's too expensive to be worth it, but they'll usually be aware that there are other avenues they could try (e.g. phoning gardeners from Craigslist and attempting to rent their lawnmower).

   Former CFAR instructor Kenzi Ashkie and I used to observe and discuss these skills in our alums, including months and years after they attended.

4. ^{^}

   Adele argued recently that a rationality curriculum worthy of the name would leave folks less vulnerable to psychosis, and that many current rationalists (CFAR alums and otherwise) are appallingly vulnerable to psychosis. After thinking about it some, I agree. I’m hoping our “respecting who-ness” thread and pride or self-esteem threads help some; there is also much else we can try.