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.]

CFAR relies heavily on selection effects for finding workshop participants. In general we do very little marketing or direct outreach, although AIRCS and MSFP do some of the latter; mostly people hear about us via word of mouth. This system actually works surprisingly (to me) well at causing promising people to apply.
But I think many of the people we would be most happy to have at a workshop probably never hear about us, or at least never apply. One could try fixing this with marketing/outreach strategies, but I worry this would disrupt the selection effects which I think have been a necessary ingredient for nearly all of our impact.
So I fantasize sometimes about a new organization being created which draws loads of people together, via selection effects similar to those which have attracted people to LessWrong, which would make it easier for us to find more promising people.
(I also—and this isn’t a wish for an organization, exactly, but it gestures at the kind of problem I speculate some organization could potentially help solve—sometimes fantasize about developing something like “scouts” at existing places with such selection effects. For example, a bunch of safety researchers competed in IMO/IOI when they were younger; I think it would be plausibly valuable for us to make friends with some team coaches, and for them to occasionally put us in touch with promising people).