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CFAR has run European workshops in Czechia for many years, I think starting in... 2017 maybe, though with a break for the pandemic.
The venue used for workshops in 2022 was bought/is run by separate organizations from CFAR and holds a bunch of stuff besides CFAR workshops; I'm not totally up on what's going on over there or the financial situation with the venue but I believe at least some events are still being held there.
Before that venue was acquired CFAR ran a bunch of European CFAR workshops in other venues; insofar as that venue does end up having to close down or whatever it would not in principle prevent CFAR from doing workshops elsewhere, potentially going back to some of the sites it used in the past, etc.
FWIW CFAR workshops were not AIUI funded by Sam Bankman-Fried and are not officially discontinued -- though CFAR hasn't done mainline workshops for a while it's done various other less-public workshops and projects, and I think there's a good chance that there will be at least something similar to the old mainline CFAR workshops in the future...
(source: work for CFAR sometimes)
Whatever happened to AppliedDivinityStudies, anyway? Seemed to be a promising blog adjacent to the community but I just checked back to see what the more recent posts were and it looks to have stopped posting about a year ago?
Fun little more dakka example -- I drink a lot of water. It's sort of annoying having to refill a glass/water bottle/whatever all the time, so I'm using this huge glass instead that I think was intended to be a vase or carafe or something. It's great.
What is a "chara inductor"?
I'm personally rather annoyed by all the AI discussion here and have been a lot less engaged recently. I would like to see much more rationality-type content.
You say :
Whenever someone in your life asks you half-jokingly asks "how can I become smart like you?", you no longer need to answer "Have you ever read Harry Potter?" because Projectlawful.com does not have Harry Potter in it.
On the contrary, this is a work I strongly wouldn't recommend, and especially not to newcomers. It's highly sexualized, contains descriptions of awful torture and various other forms of extreme misconduct, has a bunch of weird fetish material that more or less immediately disqualifies it as an intro rec in my opinion (far more so than Harry Potter stuff), is very difficult to get into thanks to the formatting, and also just... generally isn't all that good? I like some of Eliezer's writing, but I think this is very much not him at his finest.
Further, I very seriously doubt the idea that reading about a fictional government ruled by hell is meaningfully providing any real policy experience at all.
I'm not sure I agree. The normal art project also requires a bunch of "art director time" -- there can be multiple rounds of back and forth between author and artist, different sketches or concepts to evaluate, and so on. If anything, I think there's more context-switching cost required for a traditional project because of the inherent major delay in creating traditional art.
In other words, if I have an AI art prompt that doesn't come out quite right, I know that very quickly and can then run another prompt to refine what I'm going for. If I have a traditional art prompt and a professional artist comes back a while later with sketches that aren't right, I can send them art direction to refine the project -- but doing so will impose more context-switching because of the delay on communications between us, the fact that these sketches/drafts will be arriving substantially after I've sent my initial piece, etc.
This is already mentioned a bit elsewhere, but it seems perhaps worth flagging for potential readers that this technique (or perhaps, as you mentioned, a similar but different offshoot of it) is now considered... impure? flawed? risky? and is no longer part of the CFAR mainline workshop curriculum as I understand it -- I would say it's one of the more notable changes recently, though who's to say where things will evolve in the future...
You know what I've been impressed by? Some eSports broadcasts intentionally upload videos with large amounts of dead air at the end if they're showing a two-out-of-three where one side won the first two games -- that way you won't get spoiled on the result by the length of the video!
I think it's somewhat complicated -- the VDV is also used in conventional operations thanks to its elite and volunteer status (see for instance this primer on Russian military methods), which makes them more reliable and effective than conscript forces even in some more "conventional" tasks.
In some ways this might be considered similar to the structure of the post-WWII French military, where the paratroopers and the Foreign Legion were made up of volunteers and used preferentially over conscript forces -- indeed, as I understand it France did not use conscripts at all in the Indochina War, and favored using its "more reliable" volunteer units in the Algerian War, with the infamous Battle of Algiers conducted primarily by paratroopers.
(Ironically, the reliability of these units in combat did not mean political reliability -- when the French government eventually decided to grant Algerian independence, some of the paratroopers joined a coup attempt!)
At the same time though, Russia has invested substantially in technological capabilities for its airborne forces to assist in their primary airborne mission, with things like the BMD- and BTR- series of airborne APCs/IFVs, multi-canopy and rocket-assisted parachutes to allow these vehicles to be dropped (in some cases with crews inside!), and so on.
The problem I find harder is people who are mildly symptomatic, in ways that could be an illness or allergies, or are on the trail end up symptoms after a disease has probably but not definitely been cleared. "No interaction for five days after a sniffly nose" is life ruining for a lot of people.
Yeah, this is a much more difficult situation for me. I think I more or less always have minor COVID symptoms if construed strictly, given that various minor allergies or similar have the same symptoms as COVID...
Crossposted from Facebook:
The term used in the past for a concept close to this was "Fake frameworks" -- see for instance Val's post in favor of it from 2017: https://www.lesswrong.com/.../in-praise-of-fake-frameworks
Unfortunately I think this proved to be a quite misguided idea in practice, and one that was made more dangerous by the fact that it seems really appealing in principle. As you imply, the people most interested in pursuing these frameworks are often not I think the ones who have the most sober and evenhanded evaluations of such, which can lead to unfortunate results.
(Also, uh, note that I myself converted to Catholicism, but not because of this sort of thing, so give or subtract points from my reply as you will.)
In the past, I have sometimes criticized various works of media for focusing too much on bullying in school, which struck me as kind of an embarrassing and unworthy theme to spend a lot of time on. I had been bullied in school myself to some degree and considered it annoying but not ultimately that big a deal, so my view was that this sort of stuff was kind of making a mountain out of a molehill and very exaggerated compared to reality.
Recently, I was in a conversation that really broadened my perspective and I learned that my experiences had actually been very mild and for some people it Really Was That Bad. I renounce previous criticisms that I have made of works for focusing on these themes and apologize to anyone who was hurt by my doing so.
Yeah, I strongly disagree with some of his takes but agree he has a similar thing in mind.
I prefer not to get into specific examples here (several have been brought up in comments to varying degrees of controversy), but rather to discuss the broader meta question of how best to be a community that avoids falling for things.
Yes, I think my focus is ideally less on "debate specific examples" (I can easily think of many that I think would be extremely controversial, some of which have been brought up in the comments) and more on what sort of meta-rules would be appropriate to use in order to try and protect ourselves more generally and be the type of community that doesn't fall for this stuff.
What counts as an "employee of the Center for Applied Rationality"? I do various work for CFAR on a part-time or contract basis but haven't worked there full-time for a while, does that make me ineligible?
I am interested in why Vavilov Day feels different to people than common rationalist holidays.
I think that my comments on that will unfortunately involve substantial criticism of other rationalist celebrations in a way that you may not wish to host. I will perhaps write up another post with more detail.
(Oh, one other note -- I would quite prefer it if the original post didn't implicitly endorse suicide.)
I don't endorse the archipelago model for LW and this is a good example of why -- making that comment, I had no idea that you didn't want to host the discussion or in fact what your opinions on other rationalist holidays were. I'm happy to go along with your decisions since that is the model we have, but I'm not sure how I would have known what you thought on these matters from the post I commented on.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it was meant mostly as an aside and one that strengthened my praise for Vavilov Day (as indicating that this is appealing even to someone who dislikes most rationalist holidays), but I suppose the dislike was too controversial and/or too flippant.
I may write a post of my own describing why I don't like rationalist holidays/think they can do better, but I think that post would itself likely be extremely controversial so I'd have to approach it carefully.
Personally, I think Eliezer was straightforwardly wrong about that; I think the word is useful even if it's misused by some -- that said if we were to taboo "cringe" I think that if I had said "embarrassing and unworthy" or something like that I think it would have largely the same meaning.
On the main thread, I commented:
Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist "holidays" or "rituals" are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I'm not sure I agree with your concept of "Patron Saint holidays" for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
I noticed some downvotes there, which I presume are thanks to my low opinion of much of rationalist "holidays" and "rituals". Would people be interested in discussing that more here? I think this one is notably better than what I've seen in other cases and I'm curious if people disagree, just don't like me expressing negativity about other events, or what.
Just wanted to say that I think most rationalist "holidays" or "rituals" are pretty cringe, but this one strikes me as something much more real and valuable. I'm not sure I agree with your concept of "Patron Saint holidays" for the community as a whole but this one seems at least somewhat virtuous and noble in a way that I think a lot of other stuff misses.
This is a great example of the type of content I do not want to see more of on LessWrong. A dumb clickbait title and random sneers at fields the author doesn't (edit: seem to?) respect (history is very important) obscure what is actually an interesting and relevant point with respect to communication skills.
I think the fundamental point here is an interesting one but I think that this post is unfortunately marred by using a lewd example that limits the potential audience -- there are people who I would not be willing to share this post with as a result.
This is not a problem unique to you in particular -- I think many of Eliezer's posts have similar issues, Three Worlds Collide being perhaps the most well-known but there are also some that suffer from being too "sneery" towards religion or similar -- but I thought it might be worth pointing out regardless.
Like the previous post, there's something weird about the framing here that makes me suspicious of this. It feels like certain perspectives are being "smuggled in" -- for example:
Scott asserts that Michael Vassar thinks "regular society is infinitely corrupt and conformist and traumatizing". This is hyperbolic (infinite corruption would leave nothing to steal) but Michael and I do believe that the problems I experienced at MIRI and CFAR were not unique or unusually severe for people in the professional-managerial class. By the law of excluded middle, the only possible alternative hypothesis is that the problems I experienced at MIRI and CFAR were unique or at least unusually severe, significantly worse than companies like Google for employees' mental well-being.
This looks like a logical claim at first glance -- of course the only options are "the problems weren't unique or severe" or "the problems were unique and severe" -- but posing the matter this way conflates problems that you had as an individual ("the problems I experienced") with problems with the broader organization ("significantly worse... for employees' well-being"), which I do not think have been adequately established to exist.
I think this is improper because it jumps from problems you had as an individual to problems that applied to the well-being of employees as a whole without having proved that this was the case. In other words, it feels like this argument is trying to smuggle in the premise that the problems you experienced were also problems for a broader group of employees as a whole, which I think has not properly been established.
Another perspective -- and one which your framing seems to exclude -- would be that your experience was unusually severe, but that the unique or unusual element had to do with personal characteristics of yours, particular conflicts or interactions you-in-particular had with others in the organization, or similar.
Similarly, you seem to partially conflate the actions of Ziz, who I consider an outright enemy of the community, with actions of "mainstream" community leaders. This does not strike me as a very honest way to engage.
I strongly disagree with this post and think we should be much more conservative until more is known re: omicron. I don't have a writeup in great detail but thought it would be worthwhile at least to speak up here.
Any updates on this?
I think that CFAR, at least while I was there full-time from 2014 to sometime in 2016, was heavily focused on running workshops or other programs (like the alumni reunions or the MIRI Summer Fellows program). See for instance my comment here.
Most of what the organization was doing seemed to involve planning and executing workshops or other programs and teaching the existing curriculum. There were some developments and advancements to the curriculum, but they often came from the workshops or something around them (like followups) rather than a systematic development project. For example, Kenzi once took on the lion's share of workshop followups for a time, which led to her coming up with new curriculum based on her sense of what the followup participants were missing even after having attended the workshop.
(In the time before I joined there had been significantly more testing of curriculum etc. outside of workshops, but this seemed to have become less the thing by the time I was there.)
A lot of CFAR's internal focus was on improving operations capacity. There was at one time a narrative that the staff was currently unable to do some of the longer-term development because too much time was spent on last minute scrambles to execute programs, but once operations sufficiently improved, we'd have much more open time to allocate to longer-term development.
I was skeptical of this and I think ultimately vindicated -- CFAR made major improvements to its operations, but this did not lead to systematic research and development emerging, though it did allow for running more programs and doing so more smoothly.
Unfortunately I think the working relationship between Anna and Kenzi was exceptionally bad in some ways and I would definitely believe that someone who mostly observed that would assume the organization had some of these problems; however I think this was also a relatively unique situation within the organization.
(I suspect though am not certain that both Anna and Kenzi would affirm that indeed this was an especially bad dynamic.)
With respect to point 2, I do not believe there was major peer pressure at CFAR to use psychadelics and I have never used psychadelics myself. It's possible that there was major peer pressure on other people or it applied to me but I was oblivious to it or whatever but I'd be surprised.
Psychadelic use was also one of a few things that were heavily discouraged (or maybe banned?) as conversation topics for staff at workshops -- like polyphasic sleep (another heavily discouraged topic), psychadelics were I believe viewed as potentially destabilizing and inappropriate to recommend to participants, plus there are legal issues involved. I personally consider recreational use of psychadelics to be immoral as well.
My comment initially said 2014-2016 but IIRC my involvement was much less after 2015 so I edited it.
Thanks for the clarification, I've edited mine too.
I noticed this also but intentionally did not bring it up because I consider this area to be extremely negative. Hearing that someone is getting into "tulpamancy" is for me a gigantic red flag and in practice seems linked to people going insane -- not sure if it's causal or correlational or what but I would very much like the community to avoid this area.
I worked for CFAR full-time from 2014 until mid-to-late 2016 and have continued working as a part-time employee or frequent contractor since. I'm sorry this was your experience. That said, it really does not mesh that much with what I've experienced and some of it is almost the opposite of the impressions that I got. Some brief examples:
- My experience was that CFAR if anything should have used its techniques internally much more. Double crux for instance felt like it should have been used internally far more than it actually was -- one thing that vexed me about CFAR was a sense that there were persistent unresolved major strategic disagreements between staff members that the organization did not seem to prioritize resolving, where I think double crux would have helped.
(I'm not talking about personal disagreements but rather things like "should X set of classes be in the workshop or not?") - Similarly, goal factoring didn't see much internal use (I again think it should have been used more!) and Leverage-style "charting" strikes me as really a very different thing from the way CFAR used this sort of stuff.
- There was generally little internal "debugging" at all, which contrary to the previous two cases I think is mostly correct -- the environment of having your colleagues "debug" you seems pretty weird and questionable. I do think there was at least some of this, but I don't think it was pervasive or mandatory in the organization and I mostly avoided it.
- Far from spending all my time with team members outside of work, I think I spent most of my leisure and social time with people from other groups, many outside the rationalist community. To some degree I (and I think some others) would have liked for the staff to be tighter-knit, but that wasn't really the culture. Most CFAR staff members did not necessarily know much about my personal life and I did not know much about theirs.
- I do not much venerate the founding team or consider them to be ultimate masters or whatever. There was a period early on when I was first working there where I sort of assumed everyone was more advanced than they actually were, but this faded with time. I think what you might consider "lionizing parables" I might consider "examples of people using the techniques in their own lives". Here is a sample example of this type I've given many times at workshops as part of the TAPs class, the reader can decide whether it is a "lionizing parable" or not (note: exact wording may vary):
- It can be useful to practice TAPs by actually physically practicing! I believe <a previous instructor's name> once wanted to set up a TAP involving something they wanted to do after getting out of bed in the morning, so they actually turned off all the lights in their room, got into bed as if they were sleeping, set an alarm to go off as if it were the morning, then waited in bed for the alarm to go off, got up, did the action they were practicing... and then set the whole thing up again and repeated!
- I'm very confused by what you deem "narrativemancy" here. I have encountered the term before but I don't think it was intentionally taught as a CFAR technique or used internally as an explicit technique. IIRC the term also had at least somewhat negative valence.
I should clarify that I have been less involved in "day-to-day" CFAR stuff since mid-late 2016, though I have been at I believe a large majority of mainline workshops (I think I'm one of the most active instructors). It's possible that the things you describe were occurring but in ways that I didn't see. That said, they really don't match with my picture of what working at CFAR was like.
What does "significant involvement" mean here? I worked for CFAR full-time during that period and to the best of my knowledge you did not work there -- I believe for some of that time you were dating someone who worked there, is that what you mean by significant involvement?
Eliezer has openly said Quirrell's cynicism is modeled after a mix of Michael Vassar and Robin Hanson.
I worked for CFAR full-time from 2014 until mid to late 2016, and have worked for CFAR part-time or as a frequent contractor ever since. My sense is that dynamics like those you describe were mostly not present at CFAR, or insofar as they were present weren't really the main thing. I do think CFAR has not made as much research progress as I would like, but I think the reasoning for that is much more mundane and less esoteric than the pattern you describe here.
The fact of the matter is that for almost all the time I've been involved with CFAR, there just plain hasn't been a research team. Much of CFAR's focus has been on running workshops and other programs rather than on dedicated work towards extending the art; while there have occasionally been people allocated to research, in practice even these would often end up getting involved in workshop preparation and the like.
To put things another way, I would say it's much less "the full-time researchers are off unproductively experimenting on their own brains in secret" and more "there are no full-time researchers". To the best of my knowledge CFAR has not ever had what I would consider a systematic research and development program -- instead, the organization has largely been focused on delivering existing content and programs, and insofar as the curriculum advances it does so via iteration and testing at workshops rather than a more structured or systematic development process.
I have historically found this state of affairs pretty frustrating (and am working to change it), but I think that it's a pretty different dynamic than the one you describe above.
(I suppose it's possible that the systematic and productive full-time CFAR research team was so secretive that I didn't even know it existed, but this seems unlikely...)
I agree, but I wanted to be clear that my original comment was largely in reply to the original post and in my view does not much apply to the Medium post, which I consider much more specific and concerning criticism.
You know, I'm not necessarily a great backer of Leverage Research, especially some of its past projects, but I feel the level of criticism that it has faced relative to other organizations in the space is a bit bizarre. Many of the things that Leverage is criticized for (such as being secretive, seeing themselves at least in part as saving the world, investing in projects that look crazy to intelligent outsiders, etc.) in my view apply to many rationalist/EA organizations. This is not to say that those other organizations are wrong to do these things necessarily, just that it's weird to me that people go after Leverage-in-particular for reasons that often don't seem to be consistently applied to other projects in the space.
(I have never been an employee of Leverage Research, though at one point they were potentially interested in recruiting me and I was not interested; at another point I checked in re: potentially working there but didn't like the sound of the projects they seemed to be recruiting for at the time.)
EDIT 10/13: My original comment was written before the Medium post from Zoe Curzi. The contents of that Medium post are very concerning to me and seem very unlike what I've encountered in other rationalist or EA organizations.
To be honest, my impression was that it was well known that the eyes were a potential infection route and that this didn't need much other evaluation -- as I understand it risk of infection via rubbing the eyes was one of the main reasons that "don't touch your face" was such prevalent advice early on.
I believe there are studies indicating glasses-wearers have a reduced infection risk (though obviously lots of potential confounds there), that face shields reduce risk if worn with a mask (though some of this may be blocking particles from making direct contact with a mask/filters), etc. but have not done an in-depth evaluation of that topic.
Interesting stuff, thanks for the info! Subjectively it felt like "this is one of the most intense experiences of my life, my heart is pounding" etc. etc.
Raw Data.
Yes -- I think that all of the examples you mentioned are things that can become a dangerous virtual world for at least some people.
True, but the mechanisms that cause people to want to join the military (and elite military units in particular) are in my view in scope for this discussion. What would it look like for the rationalist community to be a thing that many intelligent, highly motivated people aspire to join?
I'm curious, did this meetup actually happen? How was it?
I use a P100 mask and have recently taken to stretching a cloth mask over the exhaust valve -- I figure that way my exhalations are filtered about as well as they would be with an ordinary cloth mask, while my inhalations are far more protected.
The quality of these filters is really good, by the way -- at one point I was standing near a small fire in a trash can and could not smell it in the slightest, to the point where I was quite surprised to smell the fire after pulling down the mask to be more clearly audible on a phone call!
I quite appreciate you writing this esp. given that it will obviously be unpopular with some. My own group house experiences have been broadly positive, but I nevertheless think it's important to see people pointing out things like this instead of just giving the "rose-colored glasses" view.
Having soldiers handle logistics for themselves existed for an extended period, but had major problems. In practice this often looked like soldiers foraging/looting for food, which can work in the short term but has major problems. Foraging parties are vulnerable to attacks, can provoke the populace against you, and eventually deplete easily available resources.
An army relying on foraging/looting could (and some did!) find itself unable to stay in one place for too long as a result of these dynamics, which would be awkward in a siege or similar (sure, you can go plunder the countryside around the castle, but you might run out of stuff to plunder before the guys inside the fort run out of their food stockpiles...). Similarly, if you're besieging the enemy but your guys won't be able to scavenge for food effectively once winter arrives, you might be forced to withdraw prematurely.
Strongly agree and am excited to see this -- this area seems deeply neglected.
Yeah, I should point out that not all cases of experiments without evaluation are "sneaking" by any means -- sometimes one might have a well-intentioned idea for a change and just not go about testing it very systematically. However, in some ways the negative consequences can be similar.