I think it would depend a lot on which sort of individual life outcomes you wanted to compare. I have basically no idea where these programs stand, relative to CFAR, on things like increasing participant happiness, productivity, relationship quality, or financial success, since CFAR mostly isn’t optimizing for producing effects in these domains.
I would be surprised if CFAR didn’t come out ahead in terms of things like increasing participants’ ability to notice confusion, communicate subtle intuitions, and navigate pre-paradigmatic technical research fields. But I’m not sure, since in general I model these orgs as having sufficiently different goals than us that I haven’t spent much time learning about them.
I’m not sure, since in general I model these orgs as having sufficiently different goals than us that I haven’t spent much time learning about them.
Note that as someone who has participated in many other workshops, and who is very well read in other self-help schools, I think this is a clear blind spot and missstep of CFAR.
I think you would have discovered many other powerful concepts for running effective workshops, and been significantly further with rationality techniques, if you took these other organizations seriously as both competition and sources of knowledge, and had someone on staff who spent a significant amount of time simply stealing from existing schools of thought.
Well, there are a lot of things out there. Why did you promote these ones?
CFAR staff have done a decent amount of trawling through self help space, in particular people did investigation that turned up Focusing, Circling, and IFS. There have also been other things that people around here tried, and haven’t gone much further.
Granted, this is not a systematic investigation of the space of personal development stuff, but that seems less promising to me than people thinking about particular problems (often personal problems, or problems that they’ve observed in the rationality and EA communities) and investigating know solutions or attempted solutions that relate to those problems.
Well, there are a lot of things out there. Why did you promote these ones?
I don’t think these ones in particular, I listed these as some of the most popular ones.
Granted, this is not a systematic investigation of the space of personal development stuff, but that seems less promising to me than people thinking about particular problems (often personal problems, or problems that they’ve observed in the rationality and EA communities) and investigating know solutions or attempted solutions that relate to those problems.
I personally have gotten a lot out of a hybrid approach, where I find a problem, investigate the best relevant self-helpy solutions, then go down the rabbit hole of finding all the other things created by that person, and all of their sources, influences, and collaborators.
I suspect someone who’s job it is to do this could have a similar function as the “living library” role at MIRI (I’m not sure how exactly that worked for them though)
then go down the rabbit hole of finding all the other things created by that person, and all of their sources, influences, and collaborators.
Oh. Yeah. I think this is pretty good. When someone does something particularly good, I do try to follow up on all their stuff.
And, I do keep track of the histories of the various lineages and where people came from and what influenced them. It’s pretty interesting how many different things are descended from the same nodes.
But, you know, limited time. I don’t follow up on everything.
To be clear, others at CFAR have spent time looking into these things, I think; Anna might be able to chime in with details. I just meant that I haven’t personally.
I haven’t done any of the programs you mentioned. And I’m pretty young, so my selection is limited. But I’ve done lots of personal development workshop and trainings, both before and after my CFAR workshop, and my CFAR workshop was far and above the densest in terms of content, and most transformative on both my day-to-day processing, and my life trajectory.
The only thing that compares are some dedicated, years long relationships with skilled mentors.
On the level of individual life outcomes, do you think CFAR outperforms other self help seminars like Tony Robbins, Landmark, Alethia, etc?
I think it would depend a lot on which sort of individual life outcomes you wanted to compare. I have basically no idea where these programs stand, relative to CFAR, on things like increasing participant happiness, productivity, relationship quality, or financial success, since CFAR mostly isn’t optimizing for producing effects in these domains.
I would be surprised if CFAR didn’t come out ahead in terms of things like increasing participants’ ability to notice confusion, communicate subtle intuitions, and navigate pre-paradigmatic technical research fields. But I’m not sure, since in general I model these orgs as having sufficiently different goals than us that I haven’t spent much time learning about them.
Note that as someone who has participated in many other workshops, and who is very well read in other self-help schools, I think this is a clear blind spot and missstep of CFAR.
I think you would have discovered many other powerful concepts for running effective workshops, and been significantly further with rationality techniques, if you took these other organizations seriously as both competition and sources of knowledge, and had someone on staff who spent a significant amount of time simply stealing from existing schools of thought.
Well, there are a lot of things out there. Why did you promote these ones?
CFAR staff have done a decent amount of trawling through self help space, in particular people did investigation that turned up Focusing, Circling, and IFS. There have also been other things that people around here tried, and haven’t gone much further.
Granted, this is not a systematic investigation of the space of personal development stuff, but that seems less promising to me than people thinking about particular problems (often personal problems, or problems that they’ve observed in the rationality and EA communities) and investigating know solutions or attempted solutions that relate to those problems.
I don’t think these ones in particular, I listed these as some of the most popular ones.
I personally have gotten a lot out of a hybrid approach, where I find a problem, investigate the best relevant self-helpy solutions, then go down the rabbit hole of finding all the other things created by that person, and all of their sources, influences, and collaborators.
I suspect someone who’s job it is to do this could have a similar function as the “living library” role at MIRI (I’m not sure how exactly that worked for them though)
Oh. Yeah. I think this is pretty good. When someone does something particularly good, I do try to follow up on all their stuff.
And, I do keep track of the histories of the various lineages and where people came from and what influenced them. It’s pretty interesting how many different things are descended from the same nodes.
But, you know, limited time. I don’t follow up on everything.
To be clear, others at CFAR have spent time looking into these things, I think; Anna might be able to chime in with details. I just meant that I haven’t personally.
I haven’t done any of the programs you mentioned. And I’m pretty young, so my selection is limited. But I’ve done lots of personal development workshop and trainings, both before and after my CFAR workshop, and my CFAR workshop was far and above the densest in terms of content, and most transformative on both my day-to-day processing, and my life trajectory.
The only thing that compares are some dedicated, years long relationships with skilled mentors.
YMMV. I think my experience was an outlier.
(This is Dan from CFAR)
Warning: this sampling method contains selection effects.
Hahahahah. Strong agree.