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.]

Actually, I think this touches on something that is useful to understand about CFAR in general.
Most of our "knowledge" (about rationality, about running workshops, about how people can react to x-risk, etc.) is what I might call "trade knowledge", it comes from having lots of personal experience in the domain, and building up good procedures via mostly-trial and error (plus metacognition and theorizing about noticed problems might be, and how to fix them).
This is distinct from scientific knowledge, which is build up from robustly verified premises, tested by explicit attempts at falsification.
(I'm reminded of an old LW post, that I can't find, about Eliezer giving some young kid (who wants to be a writer) writing advice, while a bunch of bystanders signal that they don't regard Eliezer as trustworthy.)
For instance, I might lead someone through an IDC like process at a CFAR workshop. This isn't because I've done rigorous tests (or I know of others who have done rigorous tests) of IDC, or because I've concluded from the neuroscience literature the IDC is the optimal process for arriving at true beliefs.
Rather, its that I (and other CFAR staff) have interacted with people who have a conflict between beliefs / models / urges / "parts", a lot, in addition to spending even more time engaging with those problems in ourselves. And from that exploration, this IDC-process seems to work well, in the sense of getting good results. So, I have a prior that it will be useful for the nth person. (Of course sometime this isn't the case, because people can be really different, and occasionally a tool will be ineffective, or even harmful, despite being extremely useful for most people.)
The same goes for, for instance, whatever conversational facilitation acumen I've acquired. I don't want to be making a claim that, say, "finding a Double Crux is the objectively correct process, or the optimal process, for resolving disagreements." Only that I've spent a lot of time resolving disagreements, and, at least sometimes, at least for me, this strategy seems to help substantially.
I can also give theoretical reasons why I think it works, but those theory reasons are not much of a crux: if a person can't seem to make something useful happen when they try to Double Crux, but something useful does happen when they do this other thing, I think they should do the other thing, theory be damned. It might be that that person is trying to apply the Double Crux pattern in a domain that its not suited for (but I don't know that, because I haven't tried to work in that domain yet), or it might be that they're missing a piece or doing it wrong, and we might be able to iron it out if I observed their process, or maybe they have some other skill that I don't have myself, and they're so good at that skill that trying to do the Double Crux thing is a step backwards (in the same way that there are different schools of martial arts).
The fact that my knowledge, and CFAR's knowledge, in these domains is trade knowledge has some important implications: