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.]

(This is Dan from CFAR)
In terms of what happened that day, the article covers it about as well as I could. There’s also a report from the sheriff’s office which goes into a bit more detail about some parts.
For context, all four of the main people involved live in the Bay Area and interact with the rationality community. Three of them had been to a CFAR workshop. Two of them are close to each other, and CFAR had banned them prior to the reunion based on a bunch of concerning things they’ve done. The other two I’m not sure how they got involved.
They have made a bunch of complaints about CFAR and other parts of the community (the bulk of which are false or hard to follow), and it seems like they were trying to create a big dramatic event to attract attention. I’m not sure quite how they expected it to go.
This doesn’t seem like the right venue to go into details to try to sort out the concerns about them or the complaints they’ve raised; there are some people looking into each of those things.