Summary: We outline the case for CFAR, including:

CFAR is in the middle of our annual matching fundraiser right now. If you've been thinking of donating to CFAR, now is the best time to decide for probably at least half a year. Donations up to $150,000 will be matched until January 31st; and Matt Wage, who is matching the last $50,000 of donations, has vowed not to donate unless matched.[1]

Our workshops are cash-flow positive, and subsidize our basic operations (you are not subsidizing workshop attendees). But we can't yet run workshops often enough to fully cover our core operations. We also need to do more formal experiments, and we want to create free and low-cost curriculum with far broader reach than the current workshops. Donations are needed to keep the lights on at CFAR, fund free programs like the Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition, and let us do new and interesting things in 2014 (see below, at length).[2]

Our long-term goal

CFAR's long-term goal is to create people who can and will solve important problems -- whatever the important problems turn out to be.[3]

We therefore aim to create a community with three key properties:

Competence -- The ability to get things done in the real world. For example, the ability to work hard, follow through on plans, push past your fears, navigate social situations, organize teams of people, start and run successful businesses, etc.
Epistemic rationality -- The ability to form relatively accurate beliefs. Especially the ability to form such beliefs in cases where data is limited, motivated cognition is tempting, or the conventional wisdom is incorrect.
Do-gooding -- A desire to make the world better for all its people; the tendency to jump in and start/assist projects that might help (whether by labor or by donation); and ambition in keeping an eye out for projects that might help a lot and not just a little.

Why competence, epistemic rationality, and do-gooding?

To change the world, we'll need to be able to take effective action (competence). We'll need to be able to form a good implicit and explicit understanding of the human world and how to shift it. We'll need to have the best shot we can get at modeling situations yet

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Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR)