This post is the main part of a sequence of year-end efforts to invite real conversation about CFAR, published to coincide with our fundraiser.

Introduction / What’s up with this post

My main aim with this post is to have a real conversation about aCFAR^[1] that helps us be situated within a community that (after this conversation) knows us. My idea for how to do this is to show you guys a bunch of pieces of how we’re approaching things, in enough detail to let you kibitz.^[2]

My secondary aim, which I also care about, is to see if some of you wish to donate, once you understand who we are and what we’re doing. (Some of you may wish to skip to the donation section.)

Since this post is aimed partly at letting you kibitz on our process, it’s long.^[3] Compared to most fundraiser posts, it’s also a bit unusually structured. Please feel free to skip around, and to participate in the comment thread after reading only whatever (maybe tiny) pieces interest you.

I’d like CFAR to live in a community

I’d like CFAR to live in a community where:

People can see aCFAR
We can see you guys seeing us
Folks are sharing what they’re seeing, not what their theory says they should see
Interested folks within LessWrong, and within the CFAR alumni community, can benefit from the experience we gather as we try things and collide with reality. Our failures and fizzles aren’t opaque (they have moving parts), and our successes can be built on by others
You guys can tell us what we’re missing and help us do cooler experiments
We are all aware in common knowledge that aCFAR is one group among many. We all know together that other groups already have norms and customs and their own local territories. Both we and you guys can track where we are having good or bad impacts on the spaces around us; it’s easier to be a good neighbor

In the past, CFAR didn't know how to live in a community in this way (partly because I was often in charge, and I didn’t know how to do it). But I think CFAR and I now have the ability to do this.

As an example of the gap: I used to be somehow trying to claim that we were running our organization in the best, most EA-efficient, or most rational way. As a result, whenever someone argued in public that some revised action would be better, I thought I had to either:

Change what I was doing (costly, in cases where I had a multi-step plan they weren’t tracking or knew so

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Seth Caldwell

Seth Caldwell