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 closest current stab is that we’re the “Center for Bridging between Common Sense and Singularity Scenarios.” (This is obviously not our real name. But if I had to grab a handle that gestures at our raison d’etre, at the moment I’d pick this one. We’ve been internally joking about renaming ourselves this for some months now.)
To elaborate: thinking about singularity scenarios is profoundly disorienting (IMO, typically worse than losing a deeply held childhood religion or similar). Folks over and over again encounter similar failure modes as they attempt this. It can be useful to have an institution for assisting with this -- collecting concepts and tools that were useful for previous waves who’ve attempted thought/work about singularity scenarios, and attempting to pass them on to those who are currently beginning to think about such scenarios.
Relatedly, the pattern of thinking required for considering AI risk and related concepts at all is pretty different from the patterns of thinking that suffice in most other contexts, and it can be useful to have a group that attempts to collect these and pass them forward.
Further, it can be useful to figure out how the heck to do teams and culture in a manner that can withstand the disruptions that can come from taking singularity scenarios seriously.
So, my best current angle on CFAR is that we should try to be a place that can help people through these standard failure modes -- a place that can try to answer the question “how can we be sane and reasonable and sensible and appropriately taking-things-seriously in the face of singularity scenarios,” and can try to pass on our answer, and can notice and adjust when our answer turns out to be invalid.
To link this up with our concrete activities:
AIRCS workshops / MSFP:
Mainline workshops, alumni reunions, alumni workshops unrelated to AI risk, etc.:
“Sandboxes” toward trying to understand how to have a healthy culture in contact with AI safety:
Our instructor training program, and our attempt to maintain a staff who is skilled at seeing what cognitive processes are actually running in people:
To explain what “bridging betwen common sense and singularity scenarios” has to do with “applied rationality” and the LW Sequences and so on: