CFAR Participant Handbook now available to all

This content is a real gem. It's easy and fun to read, yet offers a high density of CFAR's unique insights which are worth knowing to improve your life. It also manages to speak to all rationality skill levels and knowledge.

I would love to see this content featured on CFAR's site, which is currently kind of a black box in terms of what specific "rationality" they teach. There's this FAQ answer that lists the topics of the workshop, but I suspect it's better to let prospective workshop attendees dive in more ahead of time if they're curious.

I was so inspired by how this handbook makes CFAR look good that we're now working on the same thing at my startup Relationship Hero, a public-facing handbook that will make our coaching less of a black box. Update: It's live here.

Curated. CFAR's content has been quite valuable to me personally, and I know many people who have found the individual techniques and overall mindset valuable. (Moreoever, many of those concepts have went on to become building blocks of further rationality development)

Some of my thoughts here feature in the recent AMA: I think of CFAR as having "forked the LW epistemological codebase", and then going on to do a bunch of development in a private branch. I think a lot of issues from the past few years have come from disconnects between people who having been using 'the private beta branch' and people using the classic 'LessWrong 1.0 epistemological framework.'" 

I think this was basically fine (for reasons habryka gets at here and Geoff Anders gets at here), but it does mean there's a bunch of 'research debt' that needs to be paid off.

I do hope at some point for a sequence that's more explicitly designed to be standalone, without having gone to a CFAR workshop. But meanwhile it seems good to have this document more publicly accessible.

I'm really happy to see this become public! Personally, I find PDFs nicer than paper books for multiple reasons (can listen to, can annotate and keep easier).

Was there anything in particular that convinced the team to make it public at this point?

Any chance you could make this available as epub or mobi also, for people with eReaders? I'd be happy to pay for it on say Kindle Store.

To anyone landing on this page, the CFAR handbook is now available on LessWrong as a native sequence [? · GW].

I strongly upvoted this.

On one hand – the CFAR handbook would be a weird fit for the anthology style books we have published so far. But, it would be a great fit for being a standalone book, and I think it makes sense to use the Review to take stock of what other books we should be publishing.

The current version of the CFAR handbook isn't super optimized for being read outside the context of a workshop. I think it'd be worth the effort of converting it both into standalone posts that articulate particular concepts, and editing together into a more cohesive experience. 

I like the epistemic status on the front chapter ("this book is written as a supplement to a workshop. We have no idea what will happen to you if you read it on it's own!") but ideally it'd be nice if we, like, tried having some newer people attempt to read it and see what does happen.

It's really interesting to see how many bits of what's in this handbook match important skills I either use with my clients or teach them to do. Focusing and Inner Simulation, obviously. But also bits of Socratic Ducking and Polaris. (On the other hand, I have reservations with some parts of IDC and "Understanding Shoulds", in that most of the time, the problems I help people overcome are rooted in utterly useless shoulds that they are taking far too seriously, not in the desires they're failing to take seriously enough.)

Quick question though: what is the copyright and/or licensing status of this document? (It also appears to be using copyrighted artwork from various outside sources, such as xkcd, without even crediting those creators, let alone affirming their copyrights.)

The CFAR handbook is very valuable but I wouldn't include it in the 2020 review. Or if then more as a "further reading" section at the end. Actually, such a list could be valuable. It could include links to relevant blogs (e.g. those already supporting cross-posting). 

Hey, 

There's a small typo on page 84

..Quinn’s friends aren?t taking...

Perhaps the problem in "aren?t" is a unicode character that's not supported by my reader rather than an actual question mark.

Thank you very much for posting this <3

Hello! I'm wondering if I can translate your book into Russian?

I'm not going to monetize it, and of course I will give the credits.

Right at the start under "How to use this book", there is this paragraph:

If you have never been to a CFAR workshop, and don’t have any near-term
plans to come to one, then you may be the kind of person who would love to
set their eyes on a guide to improving one’s rationality, full of straightforward
instructions and exercises on how to think more clearly, act more effectively,
learn more from your experiences, make better decisions, and do more with
your life. This book is not that guide (nor is the workshop itself, for that
matter). It was never intended to be that guide.

I'm partway through reading the sequences, have read plenty of other LW posts, but have no possibility to attend CFAR workshops anytime soon. Still, I want to get more experience with applied rationality. Would you say reading (parts of) this handbook and trying exercises that seem relevant to my situation is a reasonable thing to try (while minding all your precautions)? Or do you know of a better way to train one's skills in applying rationality?

Awesome, thanks! Is there an e-book version?

Thank you very much! Excited to read it :)

If it's simple, is it possible to publish also a kindle version?

I was just wondering why lesswrong posts about constant false alarm rate...

Do I deserve some credit?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019?commentId=MjCcvKXpvuWK4zd9g [LW(p) · GW(p)]