Hi all! After about five years of hibernation and quietly getting our bearings,^[1] CFAR will soon be running two pilot mainline workshops, and may run many more, depending how these go.

First, a minor name change request 

We would like now to be called “A Center for Applied Rationality,” not “the Center for Applied Rationality.” Because we’d like to be visibly not trying to be the one canonical locus.

Second, pilot workshops! 

We have two, and are currently accepting applications / sign-ups:

• Nov 5–9, in California;
• Jan 21–25, near Austin, TX;

Apply here.

Third, a bit about what to expect if you come

The workshops will have a familiar form factor:

• 4.5 days (arrive Wednesday evening; depart Sunday night or Monday morning).
  ~25 participants, plus a few volunteers.
• 5 instructors.
• Immersive, on-site, with lots of conversation over meals and into the evenings.

I like this form factor, because:

• Ideal length: Usually, people spend the first two days settling in, getting used to this particular set of strangers, etc. With a 4.5 day workshop, that still leaves us 2.5 days to have exceptionally present/earnest conversations. This length lets people settle into really deep conversational threads, without getting too exhausted.
• Creates a local social context: Much of human thinking is social. We will let ourselves think a certain way when we have conversation-partners who are up for thinking that way with us, and when we can see a social context where many people are doing it in a way that seems healthy/happy.
• It helps CFAR staff do gradient descent on how to make the social contexts we want, as well as on how to “teach” particular "rationality techniques.”
  • There’s a bunch of features we desire from the social context: people can make new, lasting friendships; can have earnest conversations about stuff they care about; can be and feel free, conscious, and in touch with what matters to them; can acquire lastingly more traction on their “Hamming Questions,” etc. Workshops are a good format for learning how to create particular social contexts, and how to help people become consciously empowered about particular aspects of being human. (I think.)

Many classic classes, with some new stuff and a subtly different tone:

Like CFAR’s previous workshops, the new workshops are jam-packed with considerably more content than most people expect from 4.5 days.

This includes:

1) Many “CFAR classics,” probably including: Inner Simulator, TAPs, Goal-Factoring, Focusing, Resolve Cycles, CoZE lab, and Hamming Questions. (There's no need to look at this stuff before coming; I’m only linking in case you want to get an idea.)

2) A tone shift (vs the classic workshops) to more of a “rationality hobbyist convention, with visitors from many philosophical schools.” In both our newer (less polished) classes and our remakes of some classics, we’re emphasizing aspects of the human condition that some of us felt were underexplored in the Sequences and in previous CFAR workshops. Notably:

• a) Pride in craftsmanship, and how this makes it easier to do good work;
• b) Where people get “energy” from, for doing hard, uncertain, or socially courageous work.
• c) Feedback loops, along the lines of David Deutsch’s falsificationism
• d) Christopher Alexander’s design patterns, and the role of beauty, and of the interplay of parts and wholes, in functional structures;
• e) Fredrich Hayek’s model of how knowledge is amalgamated across an economy (and how this depends on respecting natural property rights), taken as a metaphor for actions within a mind.
• f) How keeping "surprise logs" about our own actions and reactions can help us become aware of more of ourselves over time
• g) [Your idea goes here, maybe? Because you bring it and show it to us and others.]

If you want, you’ll get assistance locating the most fundamental moves in your own patterns of thinking, distilling these patterns into a thing you and others can practice consciously (even where they don’t match ours).

(Someone might ask: if there are varied schools of thought present, not all based in the Sequences, what makes it a “rationality” convention? My answer is that it’s a “rationality” convention because we care a lot about forming true beliefs, and about building large-scale models that make coherent, accurate predictions even when taken literally. Some people do talk about “auras” or “reincarnation” in ways that help them describe or fit some local pattern, but at the end of the day these things are not physically literal, and you get bad predictions if you think they are, and we want to keep our eye on that ball while geeking out about the full range of the human condition.)

3) A first two days packed with "content" (mostly classic material, with some new), followed by a (pilot, not yet honed) second half aimed at helping you integrate the skills with one another, with your prior skills, and with your everyday life. Our goal here is to get your CFAR-style/"5-minute-timer-style" skills to coexist with "tortoise skills," with slow patterns of self-observation and of bringing things slowly to consciousness, and with whatever relationships and slow projects you care about.

There will also be nature walks, a chance to chill around a fire pit, or other unhurried time to just hang out.

Who might want to come / why might a person want to come?

You might like to come if any of these are true:

• A big house full of rationality hobbyists geeking out for four days sounds like your idea of a good time;
• You want to experience the classic CFAR workshop, and missed it last time around. (This one isn’t identical, but it has most of the best bits.)
• You want to support and shape this particular attempt at a rationality scene (with your time, ideas, and workshop fee).

Who probably shouldn’t come?

These rationality workshops are not for everyone. In particular:

• People who don’t want to be around people quite this many hours. (As in the past, most participants stay in a large house with many other staff and participants, take shared classes with many paired exercises, and socialize over meals and evenings. Sleeping arrangements are usually shared rooms. You can always step away for breaks, but it’s still a lot of people-time.)
• People who have an object-level project they don’t want to step away from. (CFAR workshops might disrupt your progress in two ways: by being five days (plus transit and recovery time) where you can’t do much work on your normal stuff, and by doing a bunch of “thinking about thinking” that risks disrupting a productive groove.) If this is you, it may be better to wait until a retreat feels more appealing.
• People with a history of mania, hypomania, or psychosis. (There’s some evidence that everything from meditation retreats to philosophy books to CFAR workshops may trigger mania or psychosis in folks with tendencies in that direction. If you’re vulnerable in this direction, it’s probably best to not come, or at least to talk to your psychiatrist before deciding.) (For related reasons, please do not bring cannabis or other recreational drugs to a workshop, regardless of your personal risk factors; or at minimum don't bring it to share.)
• People who hate it when folks who don’t understand them try to tell them how to think anyhow. (We try not to be blindly full of ourselves, but we don’t always succeed.) 

Cost:

We want the workshop fees to cover the marginal cost to CFAR of running these workshops, and a little bit also of the “standing costs” of running an organization (trying curriculum beforehand on volunteers so we can refine it, etc). We are therefore charging:

• $5,000 if you make over $170k/year (without dependents; somewhat higher with dependents)[fn: inflation adjustment].
• Sliding scale amounts between $2,000 and $5,000 depending on your income.
• $2,000 if you’re under 25, or make less than $75k/year.

If you can’t afford $2k and you believe you’ll bring a lot to the workshop, you’re welcome to apply for financial aid and we’ll see what we can do. Likewise if you really don’t want to put in the amount the sliding scale would demand, and your presence would add substantial value, you’re also welcome to apply for financial aid, and we will consider it.

Why this cost:

The above includes room and board. Running and developing CFAR workshops costs us quite a bit; charging at this level should allow us to roughly break even, so we can keep doing this sustainably. I don’t necessarily claim our classes will be worth it to you, although I do think some will get much value from coming. (If you come and, two weeks after returning home, you think your experiences at the workshop haven’t digested into something you find worth it, you can request a refund if you like – CFAR offered this historically, and we intend to keep that part.)

(We are working with an all-very-part-time staff, and plan to keep doing it this way, as I now suspect "doing very-part-time curriculum development and teaching for CFAR" can be healthy, but needs to be mixed with other stuff. (Eliezer said this first, but I didn't believe him.) This decreases total costs some, but it's still expensive.)

How did we prepare these workshops? And the workshops’ epistemic status.

Historical-CFAR (2012-2020) ran about sixty four-day (or longer) retreats of various kinds, and did its best to improve them by gradient-descent. We also thought hard, tried things informally in smaller settings, read stuff from others who’d tried stuff, and learned especially from Eliezer’s Sequences/R:AZ.

These latest workshops came from that heritage, plus me having something of an existential crisis in 2020^[2] (and reading Hayek, Christopher Alexander, and others, and playing around), and other instructors having their own experiences. We’ve been doing some playing around with these things (different ones of us, in different contexts), but much less so far than on the old stuff – more like CFAR workshops of 2012/2013 in that way.

What alternatives are there to coming to a workshop?

We here at CFAR believe in goal factoring (sometimes).

If your reason for considering coming to a workshop is that you’d like to boost a “rationality movement” in some form, you might also consider:

• Starting or supporting a local meetup or rationality practice group
• Contributing to online rationality discussions;
• Donating financially to Lightcone (which TBC is not CFAR).

If your reason for considering coming is that you’d like a retreat-style break from your daily life, or a chance to reflect, you might also consider:

• Organizing a camping trip or retreat with friends, perhaps one where you try techniques from the CFAR handbook, or attempt earnest discussions about life.

If your reason is that you’d like to get better at forming true beliefs, or achieving stuff, you might consider:

• Making a list of what exactly you’d like to get better at, and doing written weekly/monthly/quarterly reviews about how things are progressing, and what habits/TAPs you might want to try toward progressing these further, perhaps with a bit of coaching mixed in from some rationalist who you think could help.

I think the CFAR retreat is on the pareto frontier for this kind of thing, from my POV. But of course, opinions vary.

Some unsolved puzzles, in case you have helpful comments:

Puzzle: How to get enough “grounding data,” as people tinker with their own mental patterns

One of the healthiest things about Burning Man, IMO, is that at the same time that people are messing around with personal identity and sex and drugs (not necessarily healthy), many of them are also trying to eg repair complicated electronics for art pieces in the middle of the desert without spare parts (healthy; exposes their new mental postures to many “is this working?” checks that’re grounded in the physical world).

At CFAR workshops, people often become conscious of new ways their minds can work, and new things they can try. But we don’t have enough “and now I’ll try to repair my beautiful electronic sculpture, which I need to do right now because the windstorm just blew it all apart, and which will incidentally give me a bunch of real-world grounding” mixed in.

I’d love suggestions here.

Puzzle: How to help people become, or at least stay, “intact,” in several ways 

There are several features of “humans in human-traditional contexts, who haven’t tried to mess with their functioning with ‘techniques’” that I admire and would love to help people boost (if I knew how, and if people wanted this), or that I’d at least like to avoid eroding much.

Among these:

• “Mental grip strength”: the ability to try really hard on something, or to keep noticing that something is awful if it is awful, rather than quickly reorienting to some easier state.
• “Organism-level wholeness”: many parts of the psyche (including ones I have no conscious handle on) are in sync with one another.
• “Living in a full-color world, full of normal human caring, and connected to ancestral humanity. A world that is stable, and that one is not about to dissociate out of.”
  
  (Many people today, especially high-level people in the bay area, seem to me sort of… abstract, dissociated, cobbled-together-on-purpose-via-conscious-understanding-of-algorithms compared to the people in older books and movies. I’d like more of the normal/historical human thing.)

Puzzle: What data to collect, or how to otherwise see more of what’s happening

This one is a general. But practical suggestions for what to ask people about (or what data to otherwise collect) so as to discern how they’re doing, what impact we’re having, etc. are appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

1. ^{^}

   (With some one-off and small pilot workshops mixed in, and four Prague workshops in 2022, and with the successful spinning off of LARC/Bramble, which is a small non-profit you've probably never heard of that is running its own tiny besoke workshops)

2. ^{^}

   Briefly: I became worried that “strategies like the Democrats’ strategy for how people should sync up informationally” for getting lots of people to sync up were predictably certain kinds of useless, and that there was too much of that in my efforts with CFAR and with recruitment for MIRI. I made an attempt to write about this in Narrative Syncing and in My low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn’t get farther, although I’m not satisfied with either piece. (I also think fear and urgency helped create tricky dynamics; from my POV I addressed some of this in What should you change in response to an "emergency"? And AI risk.)