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 rough guess is “we survived; most of the differences I could imagine someone fearing didn’t come to pass”. My correction on that rough guess is: “Okay, but insofar as Duncan was the main holder of certain values, skills, and virtues, it seems pretty plausible that there are gaps now today that he would be able to see and that we haven’t seen”.
To be a bit more specific: some of the poles I noticed Duncan doing a lot to hold down while he was here were:
AFAICT, these things are doing… alright in the absence of Duncan (due partly to the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge), though I can see his departure in the organization. AFAICT also, Duncan gave me a good chunk of model of this stuff sometime after his Facebook post, actually -- and worked pretty hard on a lot of this before his departure too. But I would not fully trust my own judgment on this one, because the outside view is that people (in this case, me) often fail to see what they cannot see.
When I get more concrete:
Also: I don’t know how to phrase this tactfully in a large public conversation. But I appreciate Duncan’s efforts on behalf of CFAR; and also he left pretty burnt out; and also I want to respect what I view as his own attempt to disclaim responsibility for CFAR going forward (via that Facebook post) so that he won’t have to track whether he may have left misleading impressions of CFAR’s virtues in people. I don’t want our answers here to mess that up. If you come to CFAR and turn out not to like it, it is indeed not Duncan’s fault (even though it is still justly some credit to Duncan if you do, since we are still standing on the shoulders of his and many others’ past work).