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.]

I’d be happy to, except that I’m not sure quite what I need to clarify.
I mean, it’s just not true that I consider “tacit” knowledge (which may, or may not be, the same thing as procedural knowledge—but either way…) to be “zero-value”. That isn’t a thing that I believe, nor is it adjacent to some similar thing that I believe, nor is it a recognizable distortion of some different thing that I believe.
For instance, I’m a designer, and I am quite familiar with looking at a design, or design element, and declaring that it is just wrong, or that it looks right this way and not that way; or making something look a certain way because that’s what looks good and right; etc., etc. Could I explicitly explain the precise and specific reason for every detail of every design decision I make? Of course not; it’s absurd even to suggest it. There is such a thing as “good taste”, “design sense”, etc. You know quite well, I’m sure, what I am talking about.
So when someone says that I attempt to live via the explicit only, and take other sorts of knowledge as having zero value—what am I to say to that? It isn’t true, and obviously so. Perhaps Anna could say a bit about what led her to this conclusion about my views. I am happy to comment further; but as it stands, I am at a loss.