Has anyone heard of the Internal Family Systems Model? One of the CFAR founders said he relied on it when he was designing self-help workshops. The IFS encourages you to see yourself as a system of entities and talk to them separately, and that reminds me of Ziz Lasota’s two-hemispheres theory and Michael Vassar’s jailbreaking.
Forming a single legal entity would have made it hard to protect the other projects if the CFAR side had lost a lawsuit over abuse of a minor at a CFAR event, or Lightcone had lost a judgment over taking money from FTX and had to sell the Rose Garden property, I know these people don’t do “fear of frequent consequences of ordinary human weaknesses” but that is a big risk.
I also wonder who served as treasurer and bookkeeper for each project. If one person served both projects, he or she could have caused all kinds of trouble, even if there were separate bank accounts.
Back in 2019, Ben Pace of Lightcone said that CFAR and Lightcone were one legal entity, but two boards with no overlap. Did CFAR + Lightcone really spend $22 million on real estate in Berkeley without spending a few grand to create a separate nonprofit and separate the finances? In 2024, CFAR still had the real estate and the mortgage on its books. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eR7Su77N2nK3e5YRZ/the-lesswrong-team-is-now-lightcone-infrastructure-come-work-3
I have never opened a US business bank account, but I would think it would be hard to keep the bank accounts separate if one organization has no independent legal existence, and transactions in the millions or tens of millions tempt the most righteous person to stick his fingers in the till.
If Duncan Sabien or Eliezer Yudkowsky admitted what they were doing, they would have to take more responsibilities. If they moved from chanting “we have noticed the skulls” to expecting every serious member to be able to describe times that nerdy subcultures they were not part of went wrong, they would have to give up most of what they do.
CFAR seems to have pivoted back to focusing on the workshops. Their winter 2025/2026 fundraiser only raised $10k with a goal of $125k. The curriculum sounds very New Age:
If you’ve been to a CFAR workshop in the ~2015-2020 era, you should expect that current ones: … Have roughly 1/3rd new content, mostly aimed at practical ways to be less “seeing like a state” when applying rationality techniques, and to be more “a proud gardener of the living processes inside you / a free person with increasing powers of authorship.” (We’ve been calling this thread “honoring who-ness.”)
No masks in their photo of a workshop posted February 2025 (2024 was a pretty bad year for airborne infections where I live, and alienated educated young people are more likely to wear respirators than normies, so I would expect to see someone in that room wearing a N95 or Flo). If building warm and nurturing relationships is important then it helps to be able to eat together and see each other’s faces. The venue is about a 90 minute drive from Oakland, CA (the East Bay).
This paragraph leapt out at me:
On Day 4 of the four day workshop, we spent three and a half hours on an activity called Questing, in which participants took turns being the “hero” (who worked on whatever they liked) and the “sidekick” (who assisted at the hero’s direction) for ~10 minute chunks. This activity was extremely well-liked (did best of all activities on our survey; many said many great things about it).
If you read that and say “doesn’t that sound like Effort Exchange in the Dragon Army Barracks?” you should go home and rethink the regrettable things you learn on the Internet. I look forward to reading the book on LessWrong, the splinter sects, and just how much they had in common after a hard day gardening in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Before FTX collapsed my model of LW was something like cryptozoology enthusiasts who trade posts and sometimes meet at a con, now its more like Scientology. Early Scientology offered a community and a path to self-improvement.
The four-day live-in rationality workshops at CFAR remind me of the live-in blog fests and conferences at Lighthaven. Someone in the comments to the January 2016 posts asks why pay $4,000 for a workshop in the SF Bay Area when you can learn similar content at a college where you live or from free online courses (the commenter later recanted this blatant heresy). Its hard to argue that in-person events in the SF Bay Area are an efficient use of funds, but they let people who already live there keep themselves busy.
Hello from the Center for Applied Rationality! … We have a new experimental mini-workshop coming up soon (June 2025) and hopefully more workshop content to follow after! … Pricing is $750 for the CFAR event, plus another $450 to sign up for Arbor (at Lighthaven in Berkeley). This is notably cheaper than the $3900 we’ve historically charged for most mainline CFAR workshops, since it’s a more experimental program – future workshops will likely be more expensive than this test. https://less-wrong.livejournal.com/4396115.html
This post claims that they could not find anyone doing anything similar https://acritch.com/cfar-scaling/ I know a US military veteran who had a critical thinking course which he pulled out whenever he had a training day to occupy, so maybe they needed to look outside their bubble?
Does anyone know a summary of the shakeup at CFAR in 2016? In January AnnaSalomon promised LessWrong that “CFAR’s mission is to improve the sanity/thinking skill of those who are most likely to actually usefully impact the world.” In December she announced a pivot to preventing the Reign of Steel. Julia Galef left that year and has not been very visible since. Her husband Luke Muehlhauser is OpenPhil’s Managing Director for AI Governance & Policy so still Roko-curious.
LessWrongers sometimes say that Michael Vassar influenced the curriculum of CFAR’s workshops even though he was no longer employed by a Rationalist charity. Brent Dill was living in Berkeley participating in rationalist events at that time.
The piss filter on the bottom comics!
Twitter and bluesky chatter have done so much damage to people’s understanding of uspol although I don’t know that cable news or talk radio were any better.
Another surprise is that illegal weed still has 30% of the market in Canada. I don’t know how much of that is consumer inertia (“My buddy Mike always gets me the good stuff eh”) and how much is avoiding taxes.
I didn’t know that Moray in QC was around in 2018! <Crumbles into dust.>
That is a good example because it shows the failure of imagination (can imagine the end of the world, can’t imagine working public transit and public policy to discourage driving) and because hf he thought it through he might get to “humh, some people like to drive, but its bad for public and social health, how can we discourage it while preserving liberties?”
I really wonder what he did as a medical student in Cork other than study and read racist Tumblr accounts. Did his friends never drag him to Amsterdam to ride a bike and eat an edible?
Blast from the past: in 2014, Scott Alexander posted a take on marijuana legalization which showed excellent knowledge of medical papers but huge gaps in his knowledge of what brown people or smart policy reformers have to say. David Gerard and Christopher Hallquist in the comments, digression on how pot affects your IQ with gwern chipping in. Alexander came back in 2018 promising that he was right all along with a footnote about how some people in the comments told him that people like smoking weed and he did not know how to process that because his utilitarian calculation said it was bad for society.
Baldur Bjarnason has a whole book on the business risks of LLM use https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
bad at epistemology
Gwern once denied chaos theory in a way that Freeman Dyson called out in 1985, and as LessWrongers go he is a pretty clear thinker!
It can help to think of the current US administration as less the Third Reich, more a postcolonial dictatorship. That is also a description not a value judgement: POTUS is a reality-TV star who dreams of being a Mafia boss.
Many liked the idea in theory (the Führer was Austrian after all). They pretty quickly found that a Tiroler was not the same as a Prussian at all. Its easier to feel part of an imagined community than to actually work with people all over that community.
How the frigg does anyone in the SF Bay Area in 2026 still believe that most of what big American web service companies do is driven by the profit motive? They are more like big-talking Geniuses getting a king to give them some money and promising they will make something cool (with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising and AWS and Amazon retail standing in for taxing millions of peasants). Arms like Google ads and Amazon Web Services fund billions of dollars of money-losing nonsense.
Ngo does not seem to have been invited to speak at Hereticon 1 or 2
I have bad news for them about how German Austrians felt when suddenly their bosses were all Preuße.
/s The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Principality of Wales, the subject territory of Ireland (Let alone Normandy and Gascony) were famously lacking in linguistic, religious, and cultural differences back when they were a great power. /s
I feel like the answer to the first is “name one”. He can’t mean any Chinese dynasty, the Mongols, any of the Islamic caliphates, the UK, France. Maybe he means Bronze Age Egypt? They kept hiring all the Nubians they could get though.
I heard somewhere that “there is no unitary self” can be a Buddhist teaching and TPOT draws on Western Buddhism. There is work to be done figuring out where they got their eclectic mix of techniques and terminology.