CFAR recently launched its 2019 fundraiser, and to coincide with that, we wanted to give folks a chance to ask us about our mission, plans, and strategy. Ask any questions you like; we’ll respond to as many as we can from 10am PST on 12/20 until 10am PST the following day (12/21).
Topics that may be interesting include (but are not limited to):
- Why we think there should be a CFAR;
- Whether we should change our name to be less general;
- How running mainline CFAR workshops does/doesn't relate to running "AI Risk for Computer Scientist" type workshops. Why we both do a lot of recruiting/education for AI alignment research and wouldn't be happy doing only that.
- How our curriculum has evolved. How it relates to and differs from the Less Wrong Sequences. Where we hope to go with our curriculum over the next year, and why.
Several CFAR staff members will be answering questions, including: me, Tim Telleen-Lawton, Adam Scholl, and probably various others who work at CFAR. However, we will try to answer with our own individual views (because individual speech is often more interesting than institutional speech, and certainly easier to do in a non-bureaucratic way on the fly), and we may give more than one answer to questions where our individual viewpoints differ from one another's!
(You might also want to check out our 2019 Progress Report and Future Plans. And we'll have some other posts out across the remainder of the fundraiser, from now til Jan 10.)
[Edit: We're out of time, and we've allocated most of the reply-energy we have for now, but some of us are likely to continue slowly dribbling out answers from now til Jan 2 or so (maybe especially to replies, but also to some of the q's that we didn't get to yet). Thanks to everyone who participated; I really appreciate it.]

(This is Dan, from CFAR since June 2012)
These are more like “thoughts sparked by Duncan’s post” rather than “thoughts on Duncan’s post”. Thinking about the question of how well you can predict what a workshop experience will be like if you’ve been at a workshop under different circumstances, and looking back over the years...
In terms of what it’s like to be at a mainline CFAR workshop, as a first approximation I’d say that it has been broadly similar since 2013. Obviously there have been a bunch of changes since January 2013 in terms of our curriculum, our level of experience, our staff, and so on, but if you’ve been to a mainline workshop since 2013 (and to some extent even before then), and you’ve also had a lifetime full of other experiences, your experience at that mainline workshop seems like a pretty good guide to what a workshop is like these days. And if you haven’t been to a workshop and are wondering what it’s like, then talking to people who have been to workshops since 2013 seems like a good way to learn about it.
More recent workshops are more similar to the current workshop than older ones. The most prominent cutoff that comes to mind for more vs. less similar workshops is the one I already mentioned (Jan 2013) which is the first time that we basically understood how to run a workshop. The next cutoff that comes to mind is January 2015, which is when the current workshop arc & structure clicked into place. The next is July 2019, which is the second workshop which was run by something like the current team and the first one where we hit our stride (it was also the first one after we started this year's instructor training, which I think helped with hitting our stride). And after that is sometime in 2016 I think when the main classes reached something resembling their current form.
Besides recency, it’s also definitely true that the people at the workshop bring a different feel to it. European workshops have a different feel than US workshops because so many of the people there are from somewhat different cultures. Each staff member brings a different flavor - we try to have staff who approach things in different ways, partly in order to span more of the space of possible ways that it can look like to be engaging with this rationality stuff. The workshop MC (which was generally Duncan’s role while he was involved) does impart more of their flavor on the workshop than most people, although for a single participant their experience is probably shaped more by whichever people they wind up connecting with the most and that can vary a lot even between participants at the same workshop.