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.]

My model is that CFAR is doing the same activity it was always doing, which one may or may not want to call “research”.
I’ll describe that activity here. I think it is via this core activity (plus accidental drift, or accidental hill-climbing in response to local feedbacks) that we have generated both our explicit curriculum, and a lot of the culture around here.
Components of this core activity (in no particular order):
The “core activity” exemplified in the above list is, of course, not RCT-style verifiable track records-y social science (which is one common meaning of “research”). There is a lot of merit to that verifiable social science, but also a lot of slowness to it, and I cannot imagine using it to design the details of a curriculum, although I can imagine using it to see whether a curriculum has particular high-level effects.
We also still do some (but not as much as we wish we could do) actual data-tracking, and have plans to do modestly more of it over the coming year. I expect this planned modest increase will be useful for our broader orientation but not much of a direct feed-in into curriculum, although it might help us tweak certain knobs upward or downward a little.