Summary: We outline CFAR’s purpose, our history in 2014, and our plans heading into 2015.

Highlights from 2014.
Improving operations.
Attempts to go beyond the current workshop and toward the ‘full prototype’ of CFAR: our experience in 2014 and plans for 2015.
Nuts, bolts, and financial details.
The big picture and how you can help.

One of the reasons we’re publishing this review now is that we’ve just launched our annual matching fundraiser, and want to provide the information our prospective donors need for deciding. This is the best time of year to decide to donate to CFAR. Donations up to $120k will be matched until January 31.[1]

To briefly preview: For the first three years of our existence, CFAR mostly focused on getting going. We followed the standard recommendation to build a ‘minimum viable product’, the CFAR workshops, that could test our ideas and generate some revenue. Coming into 2013, we had a workshop that people liked (9.3 average rating on “Are you glad you came?”; a more recent random survey showed 9.6 average rating on the same question 6-24 months later), which helped keep the lights on and gave us articulate, skeptical, serious learners to iterate on. At the same time, the workshops are not everything we would want in a CFAR prototype; it feels like the current core workshop does not stress-test most of our hopes for what CFAR can eventually do. The premise of CFAR is that we should be able to apply the modern understanding of cognition to improve people’s ability to (1) figure out the truth (2) be strategically effective (3) do good in the world. We have dreams of scaling up some particular kinds of sanity. Our next goal is to build the minimum strategic product that more directly justifies CFAR’s claim to be an effective altruist project.[2]

Highlights from 2014

Our brand perception improved significantly in 2014, which matters because it leads to companies being willing to pay for workshop attendance. We were covered in Fast Company -- twice -- the Wall Street Journal, and The Reasoner. Other mentions include Forbes, Big Think, Boing Boing, and Lifehacker. We’ve also had some interest in potential training for tech companies.

Our curriculum is gaining a second tier in the f...

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