I think I am a little confused by the fact that CFAR 2.0 is still doing workshops in roughly the same format as CFAR 1.0. I think if I were trying to build and teach an art of rationality from first principles, I would explore the space of things more, such as teaching ongoing courses weekly, or doing individual coaching, or running clearly measurable experiments, or lots of other things as well as workshops. On the other hand it makes sense to keep doing the things you've spec'd into, be that for good or for ill.
Anyway I am most likely just missing something simple. I am interested to know why you are doing roughly the same shape of thing?
My belief is that we're not doing it simply by accident or via (knowing how to do this and not having tried anything else), but rather that 4.5-day workshops full of (iteratable, tested across workshops) individual classes and activities run by CFAR instructors are a fairly ideal context in which to hill-climb our way toward being able to create a certain kind of social context. And "making that sort of social context, within which some individual training occurs, which itself changes the social context" is a more accurate angle on what we're up to than is e.g. "individual rationality training".
re: length: shorter is a waste, as it takes ~2 days to really drop in, and so a 4.5 day workshop lets participants have about two days in a state where they can talk freely and earnestly about real things with many others who are doing the same. Longer is also a waste, as people get tired, and 7 days seems to accomplish only a little more than 4.5. Cohorts that meet for 4.5 days, go home for some months, and then meet again (with e.g. 3 or 4 gatherings across a year and a half, say) do seem to work well.
re: coaching sessions: we do offer these, and IME they can be good. But also, back in ~2011, I kept trying to learn Andrew Critch's techniques, and he kept trying to tutor me on them 1-on-1, and I couldn't really get them. And then I finally watched him teach the same thing to a class, and it was so much easier for me to get them in that one hour compared to in the multiple hours he'd spent tutoring me. Partly it helped that I wasn't on the spot (he was saying it to others; I could just listen); partly it helped that he slowed way down in order to get a whole class to follow him in a way I couldn't seem to successfully ask him to do 1-on-1; partly it was helpful to me to get to watch other people try out similar techniques ("the same technique") while being shaped the different ways they were each shaped, which gave me more basis for creatively figuring out how I could do it while being shaped as me and not as Critch. I've heard many people say things like this about CFAR workshops (that it helped to see how many different instructors did things, since we were all visibly quite different from each other, while also each visibly doing the CFAR thing; they didn't comment as often on also seeing how the different workshop participants did it, but I suspect that helped too).
I wish I had a better articulation of why I care about social context in this way. It's something like: for most of us, a bunch of our minds are located in other people and in our inner sims of other people (e.g., it's easier for me to develop a line of thought when I know there're people around me, or at least real people I can imagine in detail even if they're not around me, who could converse with me about that line of thought and practice the right kinds of local validity checks). I like combining rationality skills training (e.g. inner sim skills, crux-finding skills, "beliefs are for true things and problems are for solving" as a basic underlying assumption that affects how folks approach specific, small life puzzles/goals) with a social context where many are practicing the same.
(This post is part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR; you’ll find more about our workshops, as well as our fundraiser, at What’s going on at CFAR? Updates and Fundraiser.)
If you’d like to know more about CFAR’s current workshops (either because you’re thinking of attending / sending a friend, or because you’re just interested), this post is for you. Our focus in this post is on the new parts of our content. Kibitzing on content is welcome and appreciated regardless of whether or not you’re interested in the workshop.
The core workshop format is unchanged:
“Honoring Who-ness”
We added a new thread to our curriculum on working well with one’s own and other peoples’ “who-ness” (alternately: pride, ego, spark, self-ness, authorship).
What, you might ask, is “who-ness?”
Alas, we do not (yet?) have a technical concept near “who-ness.”[2] However, we want to make room at the workshop for discussing some obvious phenomena that are hard to model if your map of humans is just “humans have beliefs and goals” and easier once we try talking about “who-ness.” These phenomena include:
a) Many of us humans feel good when someone notices a telling detail of a project we worked hard on -- especially if the detail is one we cared about, and double especially if they seem to see the generator behind that detail. After being affirmed in this way, we often have more energy (and especially energy for that particular generator).
b) We seem similarly nourished by working alongside competent others to accomplish difficult tasks that use our skills fully and deeply.
c) Much useful work seems to be bottlenecked more by psychological energy than by time and/or money.
d) When I (or most people) start a project, I often spend time booting up a local mental context that the project can proceed from, draw energy from, and… in some way, feed energy (as well as skills and context-bits) back into. This can happen on lots of scales, ranging from a few minutes to decades.
For example, consider a game of Go. Midway through a game of Go, I’ll have a bunch of active hopes and questions and fears, such as:
These hopes/fears/questions are piecemeal, but they’re linked together into a single “mental context" such that I can easily notice when the balance of my attention should tug it from the bits that used to deserve my attention to the parts that deserve my attention now, and such that there’s a single mood and tempo permeating the whole thing.
There’s something sad about having to permanently interrupt a game of Go partway through (eg after a work call or something). In my terms, I might say that the “who-ness” that was booted up around the game is disbanded forcibly/suddenly, without getting to complete its loops and return its knowledge and energies into the larger system. The internal accounting gets disrupted.
Some other examples of "projects that stem from and help sustain their own particular mental context” include:
Or, as yet another example: in our end-of-workshop survey, we asked our November workshop participants: “This is a weird question, but: who were you, when you were here? What did the workshop bring out in you? How does this differ from who you are, or what qualities get brought out in you, in your default life?”. And we got back coherent answers. So many of our participants probably experienced the workshop as a particular context, that helped summon, in them, a particular who-ness.
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e) The “venue kittens” (CFAR has venue caretakers now, and they have kittens) were a delight to watch, and seemed to visibly have their own “who-ness”, which many of us instinctively cared about and enjoyed watching.[3]
Concrete components of our “honoring who-ness” thread
Concretely, at our November workshop, we had:
Who-ness was also threaded through various parts of our classic classes, and we heard many instances of the word “who-ness” scattered through conversations in the hallways.
Classic CFAR content
The current workshop keeps almost all the parts that were particularly good or notable from the classic CFAR curriculum:[5] Building a Bugs List; Inner Simulator; TAPs; Goal-factoring; Double Crux; Focusing; CoZE; Pair Debugging; Hamming Questions; Hamming Circles; Resolve Cycles.
This is all to say that there’s still a great deal of material and techniques on how to:
And so on.
Many of these classes have been changed in small ways to (we think) better interface with “who-ness” but the core of the classic CFAR workshop remains intact. If you send your friends to a 2026-era CFAR workshop, we continue to bet[6] they’ll get the good skills/mindset/etc. that folks used to get, plus some new and exciting material as well.
CFAR kept it to 25 in our early years, then increased to 40 once the curriculum was stable; for now, we are again keeping it to 25. Small classes aid curriculum development. (Most classes at the workshop have about 8 guests.)
I do have a semi-technical concept I use in my head, which I'll sketch: I imagine the mind as an economy of tiny "mindlets", who gradually learn to form "businesses" that can tackle particular goals (such as "move hand"; "move hand toward rattle"; etc). On my model, a "who-ness" corresponds to a business made of mindlets; most of our learned skills are located in the "businesses" rather than the individual mindlets; and the validation we get from someone recognizing good work, or from ourselves seeing that we succeeded at something tricky and worthy, helps keep the businesses involved in that particular work from going bankrupt. See also Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout.
Unfortunately, there is no standard name for this, but it is eg discussed on Wikipedia, in this LW post by Kaj, and in Kahneman’s book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”.
A notable exception is Internal Double Crux (IDC), which I think is often harmful for growing intact who-ness; CFAR stopped teaching at mainline workshops a bit before we paused workshop activity in 2020.
We have a money-back guarantee for the workshop; the guarantee covers dissatisfaction for whatever reason, but "I expected classic content and didn't get it" is a fine reason. I'd also be happy to take an actual bet if someone wants.